By Rob Elliott
Several hundred clean jokes in a thin paperback, none of them longer than two lines.
What happens to race car drivers who eat too much? Indy-gestion. That's the whole book, a few hundred times over. Knock-knocks, one-liners, riddles, tongue twisters, animal puns, a few to a page in big type across 128 pages. There's no first chapter and no last one, and nothing has to be read in order. Your child flips it open anywhere, reads about a dozen words, and walks off with something to try on somebody.
A joke is about the shortest complete thing a child can read. Setup, punchline, done. For a child who never finishes a book, finishing something in a dozen words can be a real win. Then there's the second payoff, which may matter more. A joke wants to be told. Your child reads one, carries it off to a brother or a grandmother or whoever's closest, and gets a laugh out of it, and that laugh came out of a book. Not much else on the shelf gives back that quickly. There's no page to lose your place on and no story to catch up on.