The Stinky Cheese Man by Jon Scieszka

Hey, Story Seekers!

We have fairy tales.

Sort of.

Jack is here. The Little Red Hen is here. The Ugly Duckling is here. The Gingerbread Man has been replaced by something made of cheese that smells so terrible nobody wants to chase him.

And somebody has misplaced the table of contents.

We're exploring The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith.

This is not a book that politely tells fractured fairy tales.

It takes fairy tales apart, switches the labels, throws pieces into the wrong stories, messes with the pages, argues with itself, and occasionally behaves as though nobody ever explained to it what a book is supposed to do.

Excellent.

I should tell you where I'm standing before we start. When people ask me what kind of funny I'm going for in my own books, this is one of the ones I name. Along with The Monster at the End of This Book, Wacky Wednesday and all of Dr. Seuss. So you're getting a review from somebody who has been stealing from this thing for years.

Readit has one immediate concern.

How stinky does cheese have to be before a cow refuses to eat you?

Important question.

Book Breakdown

Jack is supposed to be our narrator.

I say supposed to be, because keeping control of this book is roughly like running a meeting while the Little Red Hen keeps bursting through the door.

Jack introduces a collection of familiar fairy tales.

Except they aren't familiar anymore.

We get Chicken Licken. The Princess and the Bowling Ball. The Really Ugly Duckling. The Other Frog Prince. Little Red Running Shorts. Cinderumpelstiltskin. The Tortoise and the Hair. Jack's Bean Problem. And the Stinky Cheese Man himself.

Even the book gets dragged into it.

The title page is enormous. The table of contents shows up where a table of contents has no business being. Characters interrupt Jack. Stories crash into each other. Type changes size. Words slide around. A page does not always behave like a page.

That's what makes this different from every other fractured fairy tale collection. The jokes start before the stories do and they keep going through the typography, the page design and the jacket copy.

Which means Lane Smith isn't illustrating Scieszka's jokes.

He's in on the crime. Look at the cover: both names, same size, no "illustrated by." That's the right call.

His characters are weird. Delightfully weird. Faces stretch. Eyes bulge. Bodies don't appear to have been assembled according to the manufacturer's instructions. The pictures are dark, lumpy, scratchy and faintly suspicious.

Perfect.

And the title story is the Gingerbread Man after somebody made a terrible substitution at the bakery. The Stinky Cheese Man runs away expecting to be chased.

Nobody chases him.

He stinks. Even the animals would rather he keep moving.

There is something wonderfully sad about staging your entire dramatic escape and then discovering nobody was pursuing you in the first place.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile 520L · ATOS 3.4 · 2,793 words · grades 1 to 6. Viking, October 1, 1992. 1993 Caldecott Honor for Lane Smith's illustrations, and you can see the seal on the cover. Note the grade band: TeachingBooks says 1 through 6, while the publisher's current listing says ages 3 to 7. I side with the librarians, and I'll explain why below.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

This book is nuts.

Organized nuts.

That's much harder.

Anybody can produce random nonsense. Random isn't automatically funny. What Scieszka and Smith keep doing is setting up something you recognize and then kicking one leg out from under it.

You know the Ugly Duckling. So when the book hands you The Really Ugly Duckling, your brain drags the original along with it.

That's where the joke lives.

Same with the Frog Prince. Same with Little Red Riding Hood. Same with the Gingerbread Man.

Which is exactly why I'd argue with the publisher about the age range.

Can a three-year-old laugh at the pictures? Sure. At a smelly cheese guy? Absolutely.

But the best jokes in here need fairy-tale mileage. If you don't know how the original is supposed to go, you can't see where this version drove off the road. A kid who has never met Cinderella cannot be surprised by Cinderumpelstiltskin.

So I'd hand this fastest to kids around 6 to 10 who already know the old stories and are starting to enjoy the idea that a book can break its own rules.

From a performance standpoint, there's a lot here, and it's a different job than a normal read-aloud.

Jack is trying to hold the thing together. The Little Red Hen won't leave him alone. Characters turn up where they don't belong. Stories end wrong. Sometimes the page itself is the punchline.

You can't read this like a normal collection and expect it to behave.

Lean into the interruptions. Let Jack get genuinely irritated. Let the characters barge in on top of him.

And when the design does something strange, stop. Don't blow past it because you're concentrating on the sentence.

Sometimes the joke isn't in the words you're reading.

It's three inches away, wrecking the page.

One reader remembered this book mainly because "my uncle read it in the best voices," which tells you everything about how it wants to be handled. This is not a quiet-lap book. It's a bit.

Readit's Review

The Stinky Cheese Man is disgusting.

I like him.

But I would not eat him.

Nobody should eat him.

That's probably why he's safe.

The Really Ugly Duckling is also funny because I thought I knew what was going to happen.

I DID NOT.

And why is the table of contents in the wrong place?

Did somebody drop it?

Also, Jack needs to stop letting everybody boss him around.

The Little Red Hen keeps coming back.

I think she knows she's annoying him.

That's why she does it.

The pictures are weird too.

Some of the people look like they haven't slept in eight years.

I would read this again because I know I missed stuff.

But I would not smell the book.

Just in case.

What Others Think

Readers have been putting up with this nonsense for more than thirty years. Goodreads shows 4.20 out of 5 from 96,395 ratings and about 2,700 written reviews.

What comes through the reviews is that people remember this one. Specifically, and often from childhood.

TJ: "I grew up with book and always loved it and today I got to read it to my nephew, just like I did with his older brother and sisters."

Elle, with the shortest possible endorsement: "I read this as a kid and it was baller."

Laura: "A delightful book that makes me laugh whenever I read it. Everybody should have at least one copy of this book in their home."

And James, who names the mechanism: "What a hilarious book! Sometimes the classics need a little refresher."

Then there are the reviewers who have clearly thought about this more than the book strictly requires, and they're a joy.

Manny: "They keep making postmodernism accessible to younger and younger age groups... they even present Jack the Giant-Killer as an infinite regress of meta-stories."

And Quí Hiển, who wins: "Guys, this is the most dead serious book I've ever read, much recommended for sassy postmodernist children."

Now the honest part.

Not everybody's sold, and one of the objections is worth weighing before you buy.

Calista wonders whether the book has been overtaken by its own influence: "Maybe, back in 1992, this was more surprising than it is now, I can't remember."

That's a real question. This book was startling in 1992. Thirty-odd years of picture books breaking the fourth wall have followed it, and some of those books your kid has probably already read. The shock is partly spent.

I don't think that sinks it, because the writing is still sharper than most of what copied it. But if your kid has grown up on books that talk back, this won't land like a bolt from the blue. It'll land like a very good joke.

And Manybooks simply doesn't enjoy the parody: Scieszka's retellings "do not really work at all well for me." Fair enough. If you like your fairy tales intact, this book is an act of vandalism.

A cheerful one. But still.

Belly Laugh Scale

5 out of 5: Laugh-Out-Loud Legend

Second five I've given, and this one isn't close.

The book is trying to be funny from the cover inward.

Fairy-tale parody. Gross humor. Wrong endings. Characters interrupting each other. Typography jokes. Visual jokes. Jokes about the physical construction of books. A narrator slowly realizing that nobody in here works for him.

And cheese.

Stinky cheese.

The important part is the variety. It isn't one joke repeated until we give in. Scieszka and Smith keep finding new parts of the book to vandalize.

Five out of five.

The book is guilty.

Final Explorer Verdict

I'd hand The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales to kids around 6 to 10, even though the publisher's current listing says 3 to 7.

The reason is simple. The more fairy tales a kid already knows, the more damage they can appreciate.

First they recognize the road.

Then Scieszka drives into a bush.

It's especially good for kids who like weird humor, gross jokes, surprising pictures and books that refuse to behave. And I'd put it straight in front of the kid who has decided picture books are for babies.

Here. Explain this thing.

Lane Smith's Caldecott Honor makes total sense to me, because the pictures aren't passengers and neither is the design. Take away the strange type, the page tricks, the interruptions and Smith's gloriously uncomfortable-looking people, and you have removed most of the comedy.

If what your kid enjoys most is catching a confident storyteller in the act, I wrote one on that. Professor Nincompoop gives them a loud expert whose claims fall apart the second two kids start asking questions.

Different racket, same pleasure. Somebody up front is talking nonsense, and the kid in the chair is the one who notices.

Or the cheese.

Very, very stinky cheese.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit