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Our materials are seeming overbalanced on the too serious side.  Would appreciate your lists of favorite funny books, funny movies, funny fun educational materials, suited for logic stage and up.  Or at least I'd like books, movies etc., with significant funny parts to them and endings that are not downers.

 

Example:

 

The Gods Must Be Crazy, parts 1 and 2

Ladies Number 1 Detective Agency

Hoot

funny versions of Shakespeare

 

 

Can be "literature" or just "entertainment" type level.

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Funny books...

anything by Daniel Pinkwater

Fortunately the Milk by Gaiman

Fake Mustache by Tom Angleberger

anything by Roald Dahl (my 6th graders are reading his biography Boy this year)

anything by Louis Sachar - even though Holes is very serious, it's also very quirky and funny

the Winston Breen series isn't funny exactly, but it's light and amusing and fun to work the puzzles

Carl Hiaseen's children's books - Hoot, etc. - have serious topics but are zany funny in places

Mr. Lemoncello's Library had a sense of humor

We thought Turtle in Paradise and Penny from Heaven were funny, but beware Holm's other historical fiction series, Our Only May Amelia - there are some hilarious parts, but there's also a baby death among other tragedies

A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder are completely hilarious

 

 

The Horrible Histories/Murderous Maths/Horrible Geography/Horrible Science books are good for early middle school age and cover a lot of ground.

 

 

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Our materials are seeming overbalanced on the too serious side.  Would appreciate your lists of favorite funny books...

 

This book was popular in my house ~

 

Chuck and Danielle by Peter Dickinson

 

"Chuck is a whippet. A very nervous whippet, who's scared of absolutely everything: paper bags, pigeons, supermarket trolleys, cats (even the little fluffy ones). Some people say Chuck's a wimpet, not a whippet, and Mum keeps pretending she's going to give Chuck away, but Danielle loves her scaredy-cat whippet and knows that there's more to Chuck than meets the eye...Seven funny, charming and totally whippet-friendly stories from Peter Dickinson, the winner of several major awards for his books for young readers - and the owner of three whippets!"

 

From Booklist

 

Gr. 3^-6. This clever episodic story set in England introduces Danielle and her dog, Chuck. A well-bred, high-strung whippet, Chuck is not just nervous but downright terrified of everything from cats to pigeons to stuffed animals to paper bags. Each chapter involves Danielle and Chuck in a different set of circumstances (foiling a purse snatcher, setting loose a herd of cows, befriending an unpromising new neighbor), and each ends with a running joke about Danielle's desire to see Chuck save the universe. Woven into the story is the recurring theme of Danielle's curiosity about her father's identity. When her dad makes a cameo appearance near the end of the book, Danielle finally discovers answers to her questions and learns why he has never been part of her life. Although the book has its thoughtful moments, the tone never stays serious for long. The staccato writing is eminently readable, the depictions of Chuck's weird worldview are perceptive, and many of the scenes are laugh-out-loud funny. Absolutely entertaining both for kids reading alone or for parents and teachers reading aloud. Carolyn Phelan

 

 

Regards,

Kareni

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The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Horrible Histories (the live action show)

Crash Course videos (we use history and science)

Me Talk Pretty One Day was really funny, but I don't know how others feel about reading autobiographical stories of a gay man

The Princess Bride

 

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We have been enjoying Joseph Gordon Levett's TV show Hit Record. Not all episodes are funny, but they are surprisingly educational and just plain fun and interesting. http://www.hitrecord.org We've been watching on either Netflix or Amazon(we have both, I can't remember which has it.).

 

William Shakespeare's Star Wars is fun! http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/William-Shakespeares-Star-Wars-Audiobook/B00E3C43YK

 

The Three Stooges are what we always turn to when we need to laugh. We love Charlie Chaplin, too. Or America's Funniest Home Videos. The kids love to torture me because I generally find one or two things per episode so funny that I laugh until I can't breathe. No educational value there, though!

 

Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

 

That's all I can think of right now.

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Some great funny read-aloud books for little kids are Graham Oakley's "church mice" series.

 

http://notjustforkids.blogspot.com/2007/08/lost-treasures-church-mice-books-by.html

 

My brother and I read them when we were kids and they may have been what turned us on to British "humour" before we discovered Monty Python. The mice get into and out of various situations including a lunar expedition and being marooned on a tropical island. Somehow they seem to have research done on them a lot, but nobody gets hurt, even their friend the cat (who because he lives in a church has decided to believe in brotherly love toward the mice even when they get on his nerves.)

 

The pictures are full of funny details too, which our kids liked searching for and picking out.

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A couple more ideas:

 

Helen Cresswell, Bagthorpe series

Polly Horvath books, especially The Pepins and Their Problems, Mr and Mrs Bunny Detectives Extraordinaire and sequel (her others all have a good deal of humour, too, but deal with some serious topics as well)

JBS Haldane, My Friend Mr Leakey

Rosemary Manning, Green Smoke

Norman Hunter, Professor Branestawm series

Lucretia Hale, The Peterkin Papers

Terry Pratchett, Dragons at Crumbling Castle

Richmal Crompton, Just William series

Anthony Buckeridge, Jennings series

Kaye Umansky, Solomon Snow series

 

How about some PG Wodehouse? Think beyond the Bertie and Jeeves ones if you've read those already; there are of course the Blandings ones, as well as some very hilarious stand-alone volumes (I'd say the favourites of the non-main-series ones here were Laughing Gas, Hot Water, Do Butlers Burgle Banks?, Leave it to Psmith [there are a couple of other Psmith books also], and Piccadilly Jim--but there are dozens of them--they should keep you going a good long while if they are to your taste).

 

Would you enjoy the Mapp and Lucia books, I wonder? They're very funny and don't contain anything inappropriate, but they're based on a sort of middle-class middle-aged one-upmanship over one's neighbours that might fall a little flat for the young. But worth a try, perhaps?

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