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Joke books for children get kids laughing and parents groaning
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IT sounds like the usual setup for a knock-knock joke: Who is the best-selling author on Amazon.com this holiday season? Rob Elliott. Rob Elliott who?
Yet it’s no laughing matter for Rob Teigen, a father of five in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who, under the pen name Rob Elliott, owns the No. 1 and No. 2 spots on Amazon.com’s best-selling book list, outpacing such hits as “Unbroken” and the latest from Bill O’Reilly.
The source of his success: two books, “Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes for Kids” and “Knock-Knock Jokes for Kids,” both of which are aimed at parents and grandparents looking for help now that their 6 year olds are just discovering the art of telling jokes, but have awful material.
“I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me and said ‘You saved my life,’” Teigen says.
Not that all of Teigen’s jokes are gems, he is quick to add. Most of the material wouldn’t be out of place in a Jackie Mason show. (Example: “Who keeps the oceans clean? The mermaid.” )
Teigen, 45, began writing his first book in 2009 when his youngest daughter was six and desperately wanted to tell jokes around the dinner table, but struggled to understand the concept.
“She would spout off what she thought were punch lines and you’d laugh while thinking ‘That doesn’t make any sense’,” Teigen said.
Each year, there’s a new set of parents and grandparents in the same predicament, which explains why Teigen’s “Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes for Kids” hit No. 1 on Amazon last holiday season, too. Each book is priced at between US$4.95 and US$2.99 for the e-book version, a low enough price to make an inexpensive stocking stuffer.
“Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes for Kids,” his top-seller, has sold more than 385,000 copies overall, with 90,000 this year alone, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks approximately 80 percent of US book sales. About 70 percent of sales came via Amazon over the holiday season, Tiegen said.
Impulse-buying aside, Teigen looks to have honed in on something that scientists who study humor are still puzzled by.
Research suggests children start to appreciate that a word with multiple meanings can be funny around the age of 7, said Peter McGraw, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado who runs a lab dedicated to researching humor. Before that age, physical comedy and tickling tend to elicit more laughs, though scientists don’t quite know why, he said.
But Teigen doesn’t expect to write any more knock-knock jokes. He said he had struggled to fill the books. “Kids love my knock-knock jokes,” he said. “But after about 400 of them, parents hate me.”
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