The Thrill of Picture Books That Let Kids in on the Joke
Spend time with a four-year-old and you will quickly learn that one way to guarantee shrieks of unstoppable laughter is to pretend not to see them sitting on the couch and then sit on top of them. It’s even better if you act confused by the lumpiness of the couch and repeatedly try to flatten the “cushion.” Another perennial crowd-pleaser is to sling the four-year-old over your shoulder as you pretend to look for them everywhere. Why do these shticks elicit such delight? Maybe because it’s uncommon in childhood to feel smarter than the biggest people in the room: to know something they don’t and to see them behave foolishly. If I were to create a comedy club for four-year-olds, the headlining act would involve a bumbling adult who misses something very obvious that all the four-year-olds in the audience already know.
Several recent picture books play to this essential aspect of little-kid humor—the thrill of being in on the joke. Like the best Marx Brothers routines, these books set up a premise that unravels, with escalating absurdity, while kid listeners are given the satisfaction of knowing more than the story’s narrators.
“Don’t Trust Fish” (2025), written by Neil Sharpson and illustrated by Dan Santat, starts off with bland information about different types of animals:
But after a few lines about reptiles and birds, things quickly go awry. When a page turn reveals an anodyne greenish fish, the narrator warns, “DON’T TRUST FISH,” and proceeds to list all the reasons not to, starting with the way fish don’t follow any template. Some have gills, some have lungs; some lay eggs, some don’t; some eat seaweed, some eat other fish. Repeating the mantra “Don’t trust fish,” the narrator becomes increasingly agitated about “their fishy secrets.” The child listener will soon grasp that this particular narrator is ridiculously wary of fish and brimming with wacky conspiracy theories about what they’re really up to:
Santat’s illustrations begin with straightforward, muted sincerity and become brighter, busier, and more gleeful—filling every corner of the page—as Sharpson’s narrator becomes ever more unhinged, ranting about fish spies, fish disguises, and fish taking over the world. A kid listening to the story gains the supreme satisfaction of feeling far smarter, calmer, and more stable than the person in charge, while also solving its central mystery: Why is this narrator so afraid of fish? The twist of the ending provides a clue.
One reason this book delights is that literature for the youngest children is dominated by God-like narrators: utterly trustworthy, sternly dependable, consummate authorities on just about everything. Like parents and teachers, the narrators of picture books generally set the rules and guide the reader steadily in a predetermined direction. But a subversive tradition took hold in the early nineteen-seventies, coinciding with the heyday of Saturday-morning cartoons and children’s educational television. Some of the funniest picture books began to mine humor from a narrator who was either determined to mislead the reader or downright clueless. Jon Stone’s “The Monster at the End of This Book” (1971), illustrated by Michael Smollin, is a classic example, with Grover, the Sesame Street monster, employing extreme measures to prevent the reader from turning the pages—think knotted ropes, nailed boards, and brick walls—owing to his terror at the looming creature of the book’s title. (The monster waiting at the end of the book is, of course, Grover himself; when the second-to-last page is turned and Grover discovers that he is the monster, his relief is palpable—though we read in small print that he feels “so embarrassed.”) Other standouts in the unreliable-narrator tradition include Don and Audrey Wood’s “The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear” (1984), in which the narrator tricks a mouse into sharing his strawberry by warning that a ravenous bear is coming to eat it, and Jon Scieszka’s “The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs” (1989), illustrated by Lane Smith, in which the much maligned wolf narrates the fable from his vantage, claiming he was only trying to borrow a cup of sugar from his neighbors (the pigs) when he felt a sneeze coming on.
These unreliable narrators are instantly appealing to kids because they extend a welcoming hand from the page, pulling young listeners inside the joke. Just as the narrator of “Don’t Trust Fish” wants to persuade readers to watch out for fish, the narrator of “The Bear Out There” (2025) written and illustrated by Jess Hannigan, has her own agenda, one that unfolds in bold, acrylic collage art. The story opens with a knock on the door that produces a terrified scream from a kid waiting inside. Sporting spiky orange hair and eyes that are reduced to featureless black orbs, she is visibly on edge, confiding:
The big reveal? There’s a bear out there. As the girl catalogues the signs that this frightening creature lurks just outside the house (e.g., “Your feet get suuuuper itchy”), readers quickly realize that this narrator is not someone to trust. . . . She is, in fact, hilariously untrustworthy, bragging about her woodland expertise while sketching a bear that resembles an eight-legged cat. But the story has several satisfying twists. First, there really is a bear out there, and kids will figure out where long before the girl does. Second, contrary to the girl’s dire warnings and her over-the-top reactions—she flees the premises, bellowing in horror—the bear means no harm. Third, as in “Goldilocks,” it is not the bear who is the intruder but the girl. We learn that this is the bear’s own house. The bear casually remarks, “break-ins happen all the time.” Donning an apron and a deadpan expression, the bear turns out to be an excellent host, offering the reader honey-lemon tea and sympathetic commentary about how frightening the woods can seem to “non-bear folk.” The end papers hold the final joke, which won’t be lost on attentive children: the splashy cover of the girl’s memoir, titled “I SURVIVED A REAL BEAR.”
If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a five-year-old’s withering “You are not the boss of me” (having caused offense by, say, helping to zip a jacket or tie a shoelace), you’ve seen how young children yearn for power. The draw of books with unreliable storytellers is that they give kids the chance to be in charge, deciding for themselves what the real story is. In a picture book from 2024, “Don’t Think of Tigers” by the South African author-illustrator Alex Latimer, the narrator breaks the fourth wall with an irresistible promise to the reader: “This book in your hands is MAGIC. Here’s how it works—whatever you picture in your mind I will draw on the next page.” The test case—picturing a cow doing ballet—produces a smug bovine pirouetting. But then the narrator cautions, “I really, really can’t draw tigers, so whatever you do, please DON’T THINK OF TIGERS!” Hence the joke of the book: kids listening to the story can’t stop imagining tigers, and, since their wish is the narrator’s command, each ensuing page is filled with a new, very silly iteration of a tiger: shaped like a cube, carrying a briefcase, flaunting a mermaid’s tail. The narrator, who has been getting a lot of practice drawing tigers, turns out to be quite good at it, and the low-key message that mistakes are the pathway to mastery won’t be lost on children, even while they relish bossing the narrator around.
In Daniel Bernstrom’s “One Day at the Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea” (2025), illustrated by Brandon James Scott, the “boss” in the story (and the adult proxy) is a giant toothy shark who meets his match in a little girl determined not to become his supper. Like Scheherazade telling stories to save her own life, the pigtailed scuba diver must convince the shark that there are better things to eat than herself. Kids will quickly see through her ruses. The girl’s menu offerings include a squid squirting ink, a puffer fish that’s “quite a filling treat,” and a delicacy guaranteed to zap the shark cross-eyed:
By the time the girl bamboozles the shark into chomping down on a sea turtle’s hard shell, knocking out his teeth, kids will feel almost as sorry for him as they do gratified at being too wise to fall for such tricks. The shark is a pleasing stand-in for a big bossy grownup, easily fooled. Although Bernstrom’s rhyming verses don’t always scan, they have a rollicking energy perfect for reading aloud, and Scott gives his characters a goofy, cartoonish appeal—round eyes, expressive mouths—amid an undersea palette of rich blues, greens, and purples.
Even as they make both kids and grownups laugh, these picture books grant children a rare authority over the story, allowing and even encouraging young readers to know more than the characters about what’s actually going on. In the real world, it’s an important human skill to recognize another’s viewpoint: to exercise the muscle that identifies when someone has a bias or when their version of a story tilts to their advantage. Anaïs Nin wrote, “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Books with unreliable storytellers highlight this fundamental aspect of human nature—while urging kids to think more deeply about why we see things the way we do. ♦