The Funniest Children's Books, Picked By a Guy Who Watches Kids Laugh For a Living

Most lists of funny children's books are written by people who have never watched a kid read one.

I've been a kids magician and ventriloquist for over thirty years, and I've performed in hundreds of classrooms. So I've spent most of my working life standing in front of children, watching in real time whether a thing lands or dies.

There's a difference between a book grown-ups think is funny and a book that makes a six-year-old laugh out loud. It is not a small difference. Once you've seen it a few hundred times, you can't unsee it.

Here's what I've learned, and the books that get it right.

What actually makes a kid laugh

Surprise beats cleverness. Adults laugh at a good turn of phrase. Kids laugh when the thing they expected doesn't happen. A wordplay joke sails right over a five-year-old. A door that opens onto the wrong thing gets a scream.

They want to be in on it. The biggest laugh in any room I've ever worked comes when a kid knows something the character doesn't. They will yell at the page. Let them.

Repetition is a feature. Grown-ups get bored on the third read. Kids get better on the third read, because now they know what's coming and the waiting is the joke.

Nothing mean. Kids laugh hardest when nobody is the butt of it. A book that gets its laugh by making someone small feel smaller doesn't get read twice in my house.

Bodies are funny. I don't make the rules.

The ones that got me

I didn't set out to write funny books. I just never got over the ones that got me first.

The Monster at the End of This Book

Grover spends the whole book begging you not to turn the page. That's it. That's the entire idea, and it is perfect.

This is probably the most memorable book from my childhood. I loved puppets and I loved the Muppets, but what stuck was the breaking of the fourth wall. A book that knows you're holding it. I had never seen that before and I have never really gotten over it.

It works because the kid has all the power. Grover is terrified, the kid is in charge, and every page turn is a small act of rebellion. I have watched entire classrooms turn those pages slowly, on purpose, just to make it worse for him.

Wacky Wednesday

Everything in it is wrong on purpose, and the kid's job is to find it.

It's a hunt disguised as a story. It also rewards the exact thing kids are good at and adults are bad at, which is noticing.

There's a Wocket in My Pocket

Nonsense words in a house full of ordinary rooms. My mom subscribed to a book of the month club and a Dr. Seuss book showed up in the mail every month for years. This was one of the ones I wore out.

Read it fast. That's the whole trick.

Put Me in the Zoo

A big spotted creature who really, really wants a job.

Simple enough for a brand new reader to carry alone, which matters more than people think. A kid who finishes a book by themselves once will do it again.

The Berenstains' B Book

I had this one memorized. It is probably the book that cemented my love of alliteration, which anyone who has read my stuff can tell.

Every word starts with B, the sentence keeps going, and it collapses at the end. It's a tongue twister with a plot.

The Stinky Cheese Man

The book knows it's a book. The table of contents falls over. The narrator argues with the characters.

For a lot of kids this is the first time they meet a book that breaks its own rules, and you can watch the moment they work out that a book is allowed to do that. That moment is worth a lot.

Fox in Socks

Read it out loud at speed and you will fail. Your kid will watch you fail and it will be the best part of their day.

That's the trick nobody talks about with Dr. Seuss. He wrote books that are funny to perform, which is a different thing from funny to read.

The ones I wrote

I write funny picture books for a living, so it would be strange to leave mine out. Here's the honest version of what each one does.

Look! There Are No Dinos Inside of This Book

Dangerous Dave has personally cleared this book of all dinosaurs. He is wrong.

This one has a bit of that Monster at the End of This Book flavor, and that is not an accident. The kid can see what the grown-up on the page cannot. It's the book I get the most yelling from.

Professor Nincompoop

A professor who is confidently, magnificently wrong about everything.

Of everything I've written, this is my favorite manuscript, purely for how silly and ridiculous it all is. Bryan Cranston read it aloud for Storyline Online and more than a million kids have heard it. I still don't quite know what to do with that sentence.

Petey Perfectpants and the Silly Sock Puppet Problem

A boy who has to be perfect meets a sock puppet who ruins everything.

Kirkus Reviews said "Get it," which is about as close to a full sentence of enthusiasm as Kirkus gets. It's about the pressure kids put on themselves, and it never says so out loud, because a book that announces its lesson stops being funny immediately.

Little Jimmy Says, "Same Is Lame"

A small guy with a big mission, which is helping kids see they're already interesting.

It rhymes, so it reads aloud well. It's the closest thing I've written to a book about something, and I keep it light, because kids can smell a lecture through a closed door.

How to actually read a funny book out loud

Read it badly.

I mean that. Do the voices wrong. Get the rhythm wrong on purpose and let your kid correct you. Stop before the punchline and make them wait. The book is a script and you're the one performing it, which is why the funniest book ever written falls flat when it's read like a recipe.

And if your kid asks for the same one nine nights running, that isn't a rut. That's the book working.

One more thing

If your kid doesn't like reading, they aren't broken and neither are you. I meet those kids in every school I visit. Usually nobody has handed them a funny one yet.

Start with funny. The rest follows.

Since I wrote this, Readit and I have been working through the funny ones properly, one at a time, and scoring them. If you want the ranked version, here are the funniest picture books we've found, and if the fight in your house is a kid who says they hate reading, I sorted those books by the excuse you're actually hearing.

Every one of my books is signed by hand at my kitchen table. And if you're a teacher or a librarian, here's how a school visit works.

Magically,
Jimmy