Ron's Info-Closet Annex

If you were Aunt Em, would YOU trust your niece with this man? That's some unintentional humour in the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. It comes from Chapter 1 of The Road to Oz, the fifth book in the series, and concerns a jolly homeless fellow named the Shaggy Man, whom Dorothy loves and trusts even after she learns he has stolen and pocketed Toto, because he has a magic magnet that makes everyone who meets him love him.

While there are whimsy and puns in the Oz books (I was surprised at how many puns there were when I started reading Baum; I had considered them the exclusive domain of Lewis Carroll), there aren't many laugh-out-loud moments, but there are a few. Here's some rather more intentional humour from later in the same book. The party on the Road to Oz (some of whom now have the heads of animals, and one of whom is Dorothy but not Dorothy Lamour), are surrounded by hundreds of fierce creatures called Scoodlers, which have faces on both sides of their bodies, can walk or run in either direction, and incidentally are somewhat racist caricatures to the 21st Century eye:

"Ask 'em who they are, and what they want," whispered Dorothy; so the shaggy man called out in a loud voice:

"Who are you?"

"Scoodlers!" they yelled in chorus, their voices sharp and shrill.

"What do you want?" called the shaggy man.

"You!" they yelled, pointing their thin fingers at the group; and they all flopped around, so they were white, and then all flopped back again, so they were black.

"But what do you want us for?" asked the shaggy man, uneasily.

"Soup!" they all shouted, as if with one voice.

"Goodness me!" said Dorothy, trembling a little; "the Scoodlers must be reg'lar cannibals."

"Don't want to be soup," protested Button-Bright, beginning to cry....

Happening just then to feel the Love Magnet in his pocket [!!!--Ed.], [the Shaggy Man] said to the creatures, with more confidence:

"Don't you love me?"

"Yes!" they shouted, all together.

"Then you mustn't harm me, or my friends," said the shaggy man, firmly.

"We love you in soup!" they yelled...

Since all the animals in Oz can talk, and even some of the plants, much of the humour (too much?) revolves around who wants to eat (or doesn't want to be eaten by) whom. In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Dorothy meets the once and future Wizard of Oz at the center of the Earth. He has with him his Nine Tiny (and fairly interchangeable) Piglets, real pigs the size of hamsters, whom he has taught to do tricks. Dorothy has her kitten Eureka along rather than her dog Toto:

But the travellers were obliged to rest, and while they were sitting on the rocky floor the Wizard felt in his pocket and brought out the nine tiny piglets. To his delight they were now plainly visible, which proved that they had passed beyond the influence of the magical Valley of Voe.

"Why, we can see each other again!" cried one, joyfully.

"Yes," sighed Eureka; "and I also can see you again, and the sight makes me dreadfully hungry. Please, Mr. Wizard, may I eat just one of the fat little piglets? You'd never miss ONE of them, I'm sure!"

"What a horrid, savage beast!" exclaimed a piglet; "and after we've been such good friends, too, and played with one another!"

"When I'm not hungry, I love to play with you all," said the kitten, demurely; "but when my stomach is empty it seems that nothing would fill it so nicely as a fat piglet."

"And we trusted you so!" said another of the nine, reproachfully.

"And thought you were respectable!" said another.

"It seems we were mistaken," declared a third, looking at the kitten timorously, "no one with such murderous desires should belong to our party, I'm sure."

Oh, please, Mr. Baum, Eureka's right -- surely one or two wouldn't be missed, except by the other piglets... It's never clear where all the mystery meat at Oz feasts comes from, although some of it is created ex nihilo and some of it grows on trees. Nevertheless, when the Cowardly Lion goes off into the wilderness to find something more suitable for breakfast than strawberry jam or whatever Dorothy is eating, it is pretty clear he ain't hunting mushrooms.

In The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the Crooked Magician creates a transparent Glass Cat. It has a ruby heart that is cold, hard, and haughty, and pink brains that roll around in its head when it is thinking. The cat is very proud of these visible brains, and states no less than 12 times, "My brains are pink -- you can see 'em work!" or some variation thereof. (I counted. This is my new email signature.) That's the only joke not related to eating that really made me laugh in the 14 Baum books. This running gag is certainly less tiresome than Baum's repeated description of food as "smoking hot", which I'm sure he says far more than a dozen times.

Turning to a contemporary Oz author, Martin Gardner made me laugh aloud twice in the first 14 pages of his non-canonical Visitors from Oz, in which Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman visit the New York City of 1998. The first laugh happened when Ozma, who is on the Internet (anonymously of course) and thus in touch with the ordinary world, called her council chamber in the Emerald City "the Green Room". The second laugh happened when Ozma asked the council members which of them would like to go back to Earth:

Ozma turned to Button-Bright, the little boy who was always getting lost. "Would you like to go along with Dorothy and perhaps see Philadelphia again?"

"Nope," said Button-Bright.

The Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger shook their huge heads vigorously. "We wouldn't be able to talk outside Oz," said the lion. "The police would try to capture us and lock us up in some awful zoo. After all, on Earth we're considered ferocious beasts. No thanks. We'd rather stay here where we're loved and respected, and no one is afraid of us."

"Or think that I'd eat one of their precious babies," said the Hungry Tiger. He paused, then added, "Much as I would like to."

The Hungry Tiger's claims that he wanted to "eat fat babies" have always rung hollow to me. After a hundred years of sumptuous banquets in Ozma's palace, he's probably stuffed (apologies to the Scarecrow). His disclaimer in Gardner's book strikes me as pro forma, merely keeping up appearances. We're back to jokes about eating people, of course.

Gardner has a contemporary sense of humour, so it's not surprising that he can make me laugh twice in one book, whereas Baum takes 14 books to make me laugh thrice. However, for charm and whimsy, Baum is a much superior author to any of his successors that I have read. There are some kinds of amusement that don't necessitate laughter.