17 Hilarious Picture Books Kids Actually Laugh At

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Jungle Jimmy the Book Explorer, smiling in his brown safari hat and glasses. Readit the Book Worm, a green bookworm puppet with big round glasses and an open smile.

Book Reviews By The Book Explorer Jimmy Vee
and his bookworm buddy, Readit

Anybody can print the word hilarious on the back of a children's book.

It doesn't make the book hilarious.

Kids decide that part, and they are wonderfully unhelpful about it. I've spent more than thirty years performing for children, mostly in school gyms and libraries, and I can tell you that a room full of six-year-olds will not politely pretend. Adults will smile to be kind. Kids give you nothing, and then somebody asks when snack is.

So this isn't a list of books somebody decided were supposed to be funny.

Every single one of these has a full review on this site, with a score, and the scores here match those reviews exactly. If I gave a book three out of five, it isn't sitting in this ranking pretending to be a four.

Here's what survived. Seventeen of them, because two more earned their way in after I started counting.

If you want the reasoning behind the scoring rather than the ranking itself, I wrote about what actually makes a kid laugh after thirty years of watching it happen in classrooms.

The Laugh-Out-Loud Legends

These seven earned a perfect five on the Belly Laugh Scale. That's not a score I hand out for a funny premise. It's for books where the laughs are built into the machinery.

1. The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak

Best overall. Everything printed on the page has to be said out loud by the adult, and the book knows it. Nonsense words. Humiliating declarations. A hippo named Boo Boo Butt.

B.J. Novak has said he wanted the book and the child to team up and force the grown-up to say silly things, and that's exactly the arrangement. The kid holds all the power and no batteries are required.

It also survives rereading better than most stunt books, because kids aren't waiting to find out what happens. They're waiting to watch you do it again.

Best for: Ages 5 to 8, and any grown-up willing to commit. Read it flat and there's nothing here.

2. The Monster at the End of This Book by Jon Stone, illustrated by Michael Smollin

Best classic, and still unbeaten after fifty years. Grover begs you not to turn the page. Turning the page is the only thing you can do. He builds walls. You wreck them.

Every page turn is disobedience and suspense at the same time, which is a staggeringly efficient piece of design for 1971.

This is the book I name first when anybody asks what kind of funny I'm chasing in my own work.

Best for: Ages 3 to 7, and the kid who enjoys causing trouble without getting into any.

3. Walter the Farting Dog by William Kotzwinkle and Glenn Murray, illustrated by Audrey Colman

Best gross-out with an actual story. There are easier ways to make a child laugh. You write FART in large letters and go home.

Walter does the hard version. The farting is the problem that's about to cost him his home, and then it's the thing that saves everybody. The joke causes the trouble and then solves it.

It's also the lowest-rated book on this list by adults, which tells you something useful. Grown-ups rate it. Kids laugh at it.

Best for: Ages 5 to 9, gross-humor kids, and reluctant readers.

4. We Don't Eat Our Classmates by Ryan T. Higgins

Best story under the joke. Penelope Rex is nervous about the first day of school. Then she meets her classmates, who are children, and children are delicious.

So she eats them. All of them.

What makes it a five is that the laugh has somewhere to go. A goldfish named Walter teaches Penelope about empathy by biting her, which is the only version of that lesson that has ever worked on anybody.

Best for: Ages 5 to 8. Worth knowing it plays very differently at four than at six.

5. The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors by Drew Daywalt, illustrated by Adam Rex

Best for doing voices. Three undefeated warriors roam the Kingdom of Backyard, the Empire of Mom's Home Office and the Kitchen Realm, looking for somebody worthy to fight.

Rock battles an apricot. Paper takes on a printer. Scissors declares war on frozen dinosaur nuggets.

The genius is that every child already knows the ending, so the book isn't surprising them. It's making them wait, and shout. Read this quietly and you've wasted it.

Best for: Ages 4 to 9, and grown-ups who enjoy bellowing.

6. Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems

Best first funny book. Small children spend all day being told no. No climbing that. No running in here.

Then Mo Willems hands them a book and says: your turn.

A kid who won't read a word will absolutely shout at a pigeon, and the pigeon does not take it well. That's the whole thing, and it's perfect.

Best for: Ages 2 to 6, and the youngest kid in the room.

7. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka, illustrated by Lane Smith

Best for older kids. The table of contents falls on the characters. The narrator argues with you. The book itself comes apart while you're holding it.

For a child who has decided books are stuffy and serious, watching one be destroyed from the inside is deeply satisfying.

Best for: Ages 6 and up. Younger kids miss the fairy tales it's wrecking.

The Big-Time Belly Laughs

Ten more that scored four out of five. Every one is genuinely funny. They just have a ceiling the top seven don't, and I'll tell you where it is.

8. The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt, illustrated by Oliver Jeffers

Duncan's crayons have written letters, and they have grievances. Gray is exhausted by elephants. Beige is tired of playing second fiddle to Brown. Peach has lost his wrapper and won't come out.

Oliver Jeffers makes each complaint verifiable, which is the trick. You see the enormous gray animals. You see what white crayon on white paper actually achieves.

The ceiling: it's a series of letters rather than a story with a build, so you get a steady run of chuckles rather than one big laugh.

9. Creepy Carrots! by Aaron Reynolds, illustrated by Peter Brown

Grayscale art, one color popping off the page, and something following a rabbit around. The suspense is real and the payoff is very funny.

The ceiling: it's more spooky than silly, so the laughs come in relief rather than in waves.

10. No, David! by David Shannon

Almost wordless, entirely chaos. David does every single thing he's been told not to do, and the book never once explains itself. That restraint is why it works.

The ceiling: it's so short that it's over before a big room fully gets going.

11. Don't Touch This Book! by Bill Cotter

Larry says don't touch it, then relents, and before long your kid is spinning, flapping, making robot noises and roaring. The child has a job, which is the best thing you can give a kid who won't sit still.

The ceiling: once they know what each action produces, the surprise is spent. Terrific for about five readings.

12. The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka, illustrated by Lane Smith

The wolf would like to clear up a misunderstanding. He was making a cake. He had a cold. Things happened.

Kids have to decide whether they believe him, which is a genuinely useful skill smuggled inside a joke.

The ceiling: the humor is dry, and it needs a kid who already knows the original story.

13. Creepy Pair of Underwear! by Aaron Reynolds, illustrated by Peter Brown

Jasper Rabbit buys glowing green underwear, panics, and cannot get rid of it. He mails it to China. It comes back with souvenirs.

The ceiling: two separate readers named it, and they're right. There's no villain with a plan here, just a very persistent garment. Less machine than Creepy Carrots!

14. Wacky Wednesday by Dr. Seuss, illustrated by George Booth

Reading the words is only half the job. The other half is finding everything wrong on the page, and there's a count to hit. A child who won't sit for a story will argue with you about a shoe for ten minutes.

The ceiling: it's a hunt more than a story, so the laughs are spread thin across a lot of pointing.

15. Too Much Glue by Jason Lefebvre, illustrated by Zac Retz

Matty belly-flops into a lake of glue and gets stuck to the table. Every rescue attempt permanently attaches something else to him.

The ceiling: the rhythm gets crowded near the end, and thoughtful readers disagree about Matty facing no consequences at all. Read it as a comedy, not a model.

16. We Will Rock Our Classmates by Ryan T. Higgins

Penelope Rex is back, and this time the problem is that everybody has decided what she is. She wants to play guitar in the talent show. Somebody asks whether a dinosaur can even do that.

Teenagers in one family that rates picture books together gave this four and four-and-a-half stars, which is not a thing teenagers do casually.

The ceiling: the first book is funnier. This one has more heart, and that trade is deliberate.

17. Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast by Josh Funk, illustrated by Brendan Kearney

One drop of syrup left, two breakfast foods, and a refrigerator turned into an obstacle course. They ski down Sauerkraut Peak. Then Baron von Waffle strolls in and drinks the prize.

The ceiling: practice it once before reading it aloud. The meter is tricky in places and this book lives on pace.

Which One for Which Kid

This is the part most funny-book lists skip, and it's the only part that actually helps you.

Don't ask whether a book is funny. Ask funny to whom.

Three Popular Ones That Didn't Make It

I want to be straight about this, because a list where everything is wonderful isn't worth reading.

Three books with enormous read-aloud audiences scored three out of five when I reviewed them, so they're not in the ranking.

If You Laugh, I'm Starting This Book Over has sixteen million views on one read-aloud video and a 3.34 on Goodreads. The premise is a five. The execution is a coin flip, and it only reliably works on four to six-year-olds with an adult willing to ham it up.

How to Trick the Tooth Fairy has a terrific hook and two real problems: the Tooth Fairy is interchangeable, and several of the pranks aren't pranks.

The Grossest Picture Book Ever is committed, and grossness is its only engine.

Two more I looked at hard and left out. The Couch Potato is clever and warm, but it deliberately slows down in its second half to make a point, which is the right call for that book and the wrong profile for this list. Gold! has terrific visual exaggeration and states its moral out loud, which is exactly what No, David! never does.

And This Book Is Not for You came very close. It runs the same engine as several books above and it's genuinely funny. It's also brand new, with a small reader pool that leans on advance copies, so I'd rather watch it another year than rank it on thin evidence.

All of them are popular. Popularity and quality are different questions, and a list that pretends otherwise is just a chart.

If You Want a Narrower Shelf

This is the big list. Sometimes you need a smaller, more specific one.

One More, and I Wrote It

There's a book I deliberately kept out of the ranking, because I wrote it and grading my own homework isn't a good look.

But if the books your kid loved above are the ones where they get to catch the grown-up being wrong, that's the exact game I play in Look! There Are No Dinos Inside Of This Book.

Dangerous Dave insists he has removed every last dinosaur. The pictures disagree. Your kid gets to point at the evidence and prove him wrong.

Which, looking back over this list, may be the single most reliable comedy engine in all of children's publishing.

Readit?

"Can I want all of them?"

That's allowed.

"Even the three that didn't make the list?"

Especially those. You may disagree with me. You're allowed to do that too.

"I'm going to."

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit

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