I had heard about Captain Underpants many a time and frankly, the whole idea didn’t thrill me all that much. I don’t care for underwear jokes and wanted to establish a higher level of thinking within the heads of my young, gullible, impressionable children. However, one day my husband took the children to the library. Without proper supervision (i.e. without nagging wife) he allowed my son to check out the book. I wasn’t terribly amused.
They were three chapters into it before I discovered the misdeed, and they were laughing their heads off. After reading my husband the riot act, I confiscated the book and sat down to read it myself, and you know what, it was pretty funny.
The premise is as follows: George and Harold are two elementary school students who are of above average intelligence, and are bored out of their minds at school, so they get in trouble. Their principal, Mr. Krupp, is an overbearing boor, and they delight in making his life miserable.
After school, they go home and meet in their treehouse to draw comic books about Captain Underpants, the super hero they invented. Super heroes look like they’re wearing underwear, so why not make a hero who actually is wearing underwear? They sell the comics to the other children on the playground, which drives Mr. Krupp crazy.
In an attempt to get out from under their principal’s thumb, they decide to send for a 3-D Hypno Ring to see if they can make him be nicer. When it comes, it works so well they have a little fun, telling him to do this silly thing and that funny thing. Then they tell him to act like Captain Underpants, and he leaps out the window and rushes off to save the world – in his underwear. Unfortunately, that portion of the hypnosis is one that they can’t undo, so they have to be very careful not to snap their fingers around Mr. Krupp, or he strips down and jumps out the window.
These books are actually very cleverly written. One sentence I particularly enjoyed was: “George and Harold are usually responsible boys; when something goes wrong, they are usually responsible.” I didn’t find the underwear humor as offensive as I thought I would, and chuckled when Captain Underpants said, “Never underestimate the power of underwear.”
However, and this is where I start to contradict myself, the further you go into the series, the more, shall we say, “gross” the books become. There are the adventures of Booger Boy, which I simply can’t do. I would actually suggest that you stop reading the series before you hit Super Diaper Baby. Everything up to that point was doable and even funny, but Diaper Baby introduces a whole line of bodily function jokes that I didn’t feel was even remotely appropriate for my family.
But again, as always, this is a decision you will make for your own children. Perhaps you’ll choose to avoid the series altogether, as I did at first. Perhaps you won’t find anything wrong with boogers and diapers, and enjoy the humor regardless. My son and I have come to a compromise that he may read any of the books up until the Diaper Baby, and while he’s not happy about not getting to read the entire series, I think it’s a compromise we can both live with.
Related Blogs:
Junie B. Jones and Captain Underpants, Too!
Encouraging Your Children to Read