Getting Serious About Humor: Hyperbole, the Risky Literary Device

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 "I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud." Mac Barnett, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature in Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children

If you are unfamiliar with what I think someone called crudgate earlier this month, congratulations! While you missed out on some serious discussions of how the above quote passed around on social media offended writers some of whom feared its impact on children's literature, you also missed out on seeing the following types of personal responses directed toward the author who wrote it: 

• I never cared for the guy.
• He's a snob. (Unclear why. Maybe because he namedrops people like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Saunders in his book?)
• What a dick. (I saw more than one dick-related comment.)
• It's mainly white women defending him. 
• He is not part of our community.  (I saw a number of community-type comments and couldn't help reading the word "community" as "club." Now I will always wonder how a community is different from a club.)
• He should resign. He should be impeached. 
• Asshole.
• His publisher should pull his book. (The person who said this on an email digest also said she discussed with a librarian having a copy of Make Believe pulled from circulation. The librarian had to point out that that would be censorship.)

This was all coming very soon after Make Believe, a short book made up of three rambling, somewhat didactic essays romanticizing children and children's literature, was released in this country. Many of the people making these comments said they hadn't read it. Many said they wouldn't read it. 

In a statement to School Library Journal, Barnett said the following: 

"Thank you for the opportunity to respond. First of all, I want to acknowledge the passage I wrote is hurtful, especially to people who work hard making books for kids. I understand why people are upset and feel betrayed. In trying to make a point, I got hyperbolic and glib. I was wrong. I'm truly sorry."

Spoiler alert: Many people did not accept that apology and the controversy raged on. It is still raging on. People may write books about this someday. I would watch the movie.

But you know what? In all that was said about this issue, I didn't see anything about hyperbole, even though it comes up in Barnett's apology and is the literary device that got this ball rolling. So let's fix that. 

Let's talk hyperbole. 

Definition

Definitions are a clichéd addition to an essay, but here we go, anyway.

Hyperbole--The use of exaggeration, which the author does not expect to be believed, to create an effect, often involving humor. Gauthier Law of Hyperbole

When hyperbole is used for comedy, it is related to the incongruity theory of humor, which states that the clash of unrelated ideas is funny. What is exaggerated clashes with something, if only what it is exaggerating. Aristotle is supposed to have recognized incongruity as a type of humor. Corollary to the Gauthier Law of Hyperbole

I mention Aristotle in the corollary not to namedrop, since I haven't read him, myself, but to point out that I'm not making this crud up. Aristotle did. Blame him.

Personal Experience

Yes, personal experience is another cliché of essays these days, but that's not stopping me.

Back before 2008, when I still had a nice little mid-list, middle grade author thing going, a Booklist reviewer said of my book, A Year with Butch and Spike, "Gauthier demonstrates a real talent here for humorous hyperbole and episodic classroom comedy."

They made hyperbole sound like a good thing. At least, I thought so at the time.

Maybe thirty years later, I wrote a very hyperbolic piece called What We All Want to Say to That One Out-of-Touch Grandfather at the Playground that was published at Frazzled, a parent humor site on the Medium platform. The humor was developed around the idea that older men spent much of their adult lives in work situations that did not prepare them for the rigors of taking their grandchildren to the playground. Among the personal responses directed toward me in response to it:

• I was a bigoted anti-male feminist and should mind my "f***ing business." I believe this was the first comment I got.
• I was a sanctimonious shit sack.
• I sounded like an ass.
• I was smug, dumb, superior. 

It went on for days!

Hyperbole is risky. 

Barnett Also Has a History with Hyperbole

I've seen Mac Barnett described on BlueSky by fans of Make Believe as being funny or at least wry, which is like funny but tends to be more of an attitude. It's a form of humor that applies a twist to something for a subtle, comic effect. Having now read a few of his picture books and a middle grade novel he co-wrote with Jory John (I hadn't heard of Barnett before all this started), I would place him in the wry category.

The picture books were lost on me, but I am not a picture book person and can't address them in any meaningful way. Or at all. The middle grade novel, however, The Terrible Two, is definitely hyperbolic, filled with stuff about kids pulling over-the-top and unbelievable pranks. Reviewers found it funny and it was successful enough to lead to a sequel.

At that point, Barnett may have thought, like me in my middle-grade writer days, that hyperbole is a good thing.

The Major Problem with Hyperbole

Hyperbole is a form of situational humor. It is not your classic one-liner, which, by the way, would probably work very well as a pull quote. Instead, hyperbole comes out of a situation. You have to understand the situation--what is being exaggerated--to understand the exaggeration.

Sometimes what is being exaggerated will be understood by the audience because of the audience members' cultural knowledge. For instance, in The Terrible Two Barnett and Jory could assume their audience would understand the hyperbole behind an elementary school principal finding his car on the steps in front of the school, because child readers know that kids don't drive and wouldn't be able to get a car up steps, if they could. (The authors explain how it was done at the end of the story.)

But sometimes the exaggeration used with hyperbole requires a lot more build-up, which was the case with "I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud." That line got a lot of build-up in the book, but not in the pull quote. What's more, not only does the pull quote not include the build-up, it eliminated a section that would have tipped readers off that there was missing build-up.

What Barnett actually said was not

"I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud."

but 

"I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole. So I now offer Barnett's Addendum to Sturgeon's Law: Maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud."

This is still not funny as a pull quote. Readers still won't get the hyperbole Barnett was trying for. But they would have realized something was going on here. If they hadn't heard of it, they would have wondered what the hell is Sturgeon's Law?

What the Hell is Sturgeon's Law?

Anyone who read Make Believe would have had access to the page before the one the pull quote appears on. On it was an account of how science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon dealt with complaints about the quality of his genre back in the 1950s. Among the complaints? "...ninety percent of sf is crud." Sturgeon's response, "Ninety percent of everything is crud." 

That became Sturgeon's Law. It is so well-known in some circles that you can find it on memes and t-shirts. Usually on t-shirts "crud" is replaced with "crap."

After addressing Sturgeon's Law, Barnett begins his very next paragraph with a transitional sentence. "It's tempting, when explaining the abundance of bad kids' books, to just shout "Sturgeon's Law!" and move on." 

And then he goes on to what became the now infamous pull quote.

A Sort-of-Joke That Didn't Land

Some people who knew Barnett was referring to Sturgeon's Law questioned where Sturgeon got his ninety percent figure when he said "Ninety percent of everything is crud." Where's his evidence? I can't speak for the man, of course, but my wild guess is he was using hyperbole. 

Other readers wondered why, if Barnett was referring to Sturgeon's Law, he said ninety-four percent of children's lit is crud when Sturgeon said only ninety percent of everything is crud. Upping the number looks like hyperbole to me. More exaggeration. If ninety percent of everything is crud is funny, ninety-four percent will be even funnier!

Does knowing the build-up for this hyperbole now make this quote a knee-slapper? No. The best this was ever going to be was wry. It appears in an essay that argues that "lots of children's books are bad..." and ends with "...we'd better do our best to make some good kids' books." The twist on Sturgeon's Law may have been an attempt to lighten that message. Instead, it made it worse.

Hyperbole is Risky

Both Barnett and I had better luck using hyperbole in writing for children than for adults. Does that mean that children enjoy hyperbole and adults don't? Or do the adults who control every aspect of what children read (see Barnett on this) believe they do, so it gets into children's books and is well received  by the adults who review them no matter what kids think of it? 

Unlike child readers, adults do control every aspect of what we read. Additionally, we get to respond to what we read in a more direct way, on social media and in comments. As noted above, not all adults responded well to our use of hyperbole in writing for them.

For me, that didn't matter a whole lot. The main purpose of a humor piece is to be a humor piece. If there is some underlying idea being conveyed, it’s secondary to the humor, it supports the humor. Readers don't spend a lot of time on humor, whether they like it or not. "Ha-ha" or "boo," and then they move on.

For Barnett, his use of hyperbole mattered. The main purpose of an expository or persuasive essay is to explain or persuade, to make a point, as Barnett said himself in his apology, and not to be funny. If there’s humor, it’s secondary to the point, it supports the point. In an essay, everything needs to support the point.

I, myself, dropped the line "And they say serious literary criticism is dead!" in this essay that I originally used after the list of types of comments I saw Barnett receiving. I decided it didn't support what I wanted to be a meditation on hyperbole. The literary criticism line was about how we address those we don't agree with, and that's a totally different thing. Stay on task, Gail! 

Whether or not Barnett should have used Sturgeon's Law in his essay depends on what he was trying to do with it, how it supported the point he was trying to make. If he'd dropped it before publication, his argument that "lots of children's books are bad" might not have raised the same kind of ire that "94.7 percent of kids' books are crud" did. 

It probably wouldn't have made as attention-grabbing a pull-quote, either. 

The Annotated "Saving the Planet & Stuff" Part Seven: What To Do, What To Do?

The following excerpt is one of my favorite bits from Saving the Planet & Stuff. In order to create humor, I use hyperbole to ramp up the decision-making those trying to live environmentally sound lives do. But I also think this conversation illustrates a real struggle.

At least, I'm struggling.

See my picnic dish collection to the right? I've had them since 2001 and used them for large family al fresco meals over the years. I don't buy paper plates or napkins or plastic picnic cutlery. But it takes quite a while to get these things washed. Cheap plastic must hold grease. Sinks full of water go down the drain before we finish the job. But I've done the kind of thinking Nora does below and decided that my priority is solid waste, those disposable paper plates and cutlery, over detergents and water. If I lived in California right now, no doubt I'd feel differently.

Seriously, I don't live all that environmentally sound a lifestyle. People who do have to do this kind of priority assessment all the time.

    "Michael? I'm Maureen Bogda," she announced.
    "Associate editor," Amber reminded him. "Don't ask what that is. I was here all of July and August last year and never figured it out."
    "We have something we'd like you to take care of for us. We need you to go out and pick up a few lunches," Maureen said as she handed Michael several orders with cash clipped to them and explained how he would find the restaurant.
    Amber caught Michael's eye. "Speaking of sucky work—"
    "Oh, no!" Michael objected. "I like buying things."
    "I'm glad to hear that," Maureen said, "because Nora asked if you would stop at the little grocery store on the corner to pick up some soy milk and eggs. She wants the free-range eggs from chickens that have never lived in cages, if they have them this week. However, she says that if they are packed in a plastic package to please check and make sure the package is either number one or two plastic because that's all we can recycle in this town. If they have the free-range eggs, but they're packed in the wrong kind of plastic, don't get them. Get regular eggs, but make sure the regular eggs are in a cardboard package, not Styrofoam, because Nora doesn't buy Styrofoam."
    "Uh … just a minute. I'd better write that down," Michael said as he started to look over Amber's desk, hoping to find some paper.
    "Nora did it for you," Maureen replied as she handed Michael another piece of paper and some more money.

The Annotated "Saving the Planet & Stuff" Part Three: Autobiographical Details

By the time Michael Racine reaches the Vermont border with Walt and Nora, he has figured out that spending time with these two isn't going to be more of the same for him. After his first meal in their solar home, which he thought was chicken parm until he realized they were vegetarians so God only knew what he'd just eaten, Nora takes him upstairs to what will be his room for the next month or so. She was unprepared for a guest, and Michael was unprepared for what he found.

    There were two small, horizontal windows crammed between two narrow closets and above a set of built-in drawers on the exterior wall across from him ("Built-in furniture provides extra insulation," Nora explained). Michael barely noticed them because he was so busy taking in the bed, the floor of a closet—its door couldn't be shut—a little table with an arrangement of cobweb-draped dried flowers, and an armchair with a matching footstool, which were all covered with … stuff.

    "I'm afraid we've collected a few things over the years," Nora said apologetically.

    "Wow. You collect bags of Styrofoam beans," Michael said, pointing to four bags filled with them.

    "They aren't biodegradable, so we didn't want to throw them out when the town still had a landfill. We use them as packing when we want to mail something," Nora explained.

     Michael lifted a roll of used bubble packaging off from the bed. "I guess you don't mail stuff very often, huh?"

     Nora took the roll from Michael. "I keep meaning to take them into the office. They'll get used there. Maybe we could bring them with us tomorrow."

     The rest of the room's contents would not be as easy to dispose of. There were a couple of bundles of brown paper bags, and plastic sacks filled with more plastic sacks. There was a pile of very ratty bath towels, a half dozen decorative tins of various sizes, partially burned candles, empty cardboard boxes, a variety of canvas satchels stamped with the names of various organizations, two partial sets of dishes, stacks and stacks and stacks of magazines, three …

    "You see," Nora began awkwardly, "we're trying to control waste by diverting materials from landfills—which are reaching capacity in a lot of places, you know—and the regional incinerators that are replacing them. We did an article in The Earth's Wife on that in, I think, June of '98."

    So they're diverting materials from the landfill to their spare bedroom? Michael wondered.

Okay. So this is kind of autobiographical. I don't so much try to divert waste from the transfer station, which is what our community has now, as keep it from going there for as long as possible. I hold on to things like Nora does so I can use them again or find a way to pass them on to some unsuspecting soul. It's kind of like the Schroedinger's Cat thing. So long as these things are somewhere in my house, they have the potential to be either useful or solid waste. It could go either way.


Here, for instance, is my most recent bubble wrap collection. I have used hoarded bubble wrap for mailing packages, though I'll also admit that I dumped some during a time management clean out binge. The wrap you see in this picture all showed up in one order that was shipped in four different boxes this past month. It's as if these people sit down and think of ways to generate waste.





And here are two different views of our box collection. Yesterday a house guest told me she was leaving me a gift box for my collection. I particularly like gift boxes, and she knows it, so it was a touching moment.

Like Nora, I have a bag collection...





...and a decorative tin collection...






...and here are my back issues of Yoga Journal.








All these things can be used again, so there's no reason for them to be trashed. Except for the Yoga Journals. That's a really fine magazine, which is why I hold on to them, but I am planning to weed through those things because you can't really use them for something the way you can those tins, bags, boxes, and bubble wrap rolls. To be truthful, though, I'm three months behind reading the new issues, so it will be a while before I see any progress on the back ones.

Unlike Walt and Nora, I do not have all this stuff spread over a spare bedroom. But I like humor that comes about when two conflicting thought processes/world views come together, and a little hyperbole is very helpful in creating that.

Additionally, though, with scenes like this one I wanted to illustrate the effort and attention to detail that goes into an attempt to live anything approaching an environmentally sound lifestyle.

If any readers are Noras and have collection of useful items they are keeping from transfer stations, feel free to share in the Comments.