Funny birthday gift idea

Eugene Trivizas has long been one of Greece's most productive and popular writers for children with more than 120 books currently in print. He has written short stories, fairy tales, novels, poems, television series, songs, plays, and even opera librettos for children. He is justly celebrated in his native Greece, where he has been described by reviewers and commentators as a "miracle worker who brings to life a whole new world based on imagination,"1 "a revitalizing force in Greek children's literature,"2 "the most important heir of Rodari,"3 and "a classic writer whose books belong in each and every library."4 Yet, the appeal of his work is not limited to Greece but is truly international in character, as may be seen from the enormous success of his book The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig (London: Heineman, 1993). Written in English, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, this book has now sold a million copies in the United States alone and has been translated into many languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The playfulness, humor, and even sentiment of this book are universal. The same appeal can be found in his other works in English5 and in the as yet unpublished translations of his other work into English that are already known to scholars.6

How are we to account for the universally favorable reception of Trivizas's work? There are three key elements in his work that explain the appeal of his writings in so many countries. First, there is his gift for humor that is rooted in his ability to play with risk, fear, and danger, and in his understanding of incongruity and nonsense humor. Next, there is the way in which Trivizas's work operates simultaneously at many levels, so that it is known and enjoyed by adults as well as by children of various ages. Finally, there is Trivizas's ability to transform the familiar, taking traditional stories and images and rotating them in an unexpected and comic way. One attractive aspect of this is his skill with wordplay in English as well as in Greek.

These three themes, which operate at different levels, are the key to an understanding of why Trivizas's work has attained such great popularity; this will be demonstrated in relation to a representative selection of his work.

The Humorous Appeal

Many different types of humor can be found in Trivizas's work, from wordplay to satire, from farce to parody. Here we will concentrate on two of the most important aspects of his humor, namely, his subtle playing with risk and danger, and his understanding and skillful employment of nonsense and incongruity.

The most distinctive characteristic of Trivizas's writing is his ability to play with risk, danger, and aggression. As we know from the writings of Alan Dundes, Charles Gruner, and indeed from my own work7 this is the very essence of humor. This skill is displayed in many of his books, including O Krokodilos Pou Pige ston Othontogiatro (The crocodile who went to the dentist; Athens: Kedros, 1984), and O lemargos Tunelodrakos (The tunnel dragon; Kedros, 1985).

O Krokodilos Pou Pige ston Othontogiatro (The crocodile who went to the dentist) is a humorous story illustrated by Nikos Maroulakis. Cornelius, an arrogant crocodile, boasts to his friends that he is clever enough to eat any kind of hand that he happens to fancy. The crocodile claims that he has found ingenious ways to eat all manner of hands, even a boxer's hand. His reptilian friends dare him to bite off a dentist's hand. Cornelius accepts the challenge, but it proves to be more difficult than he ever expected.

The crocodile story provides two kinds of play with risk and fear. Cornelius the Crocodile's aggressive hobby is to eat the hands of as many different kinds of people as possible, including the skillful professional hands of a pianist and a typist, and the obviously and publicly visible hands of a hitchhiker and a traffic warden. After we know the story, it is obvious why the author chose these hands rather than any other hands, yet who could have predicted his choices in advance? The image or prospect of a crocodile biting off hands is a frightening but safely distant part of the delights of Punch and Judy8 or of Peter Pan (J. M. Barrie; New York: Viking, 1991) and is used by Rudyard Kipling in his tale The Undertakers, about an Indian crocodile, the mugger of Mugger Ghaut (The Second Jungle Book; London: Macmillan, 1895). The imaginary savage crocodile is, thus, a tested piece of comedy for children that is here given a new twist in the form of a crocodile as collector, a crocodile who can speak, a crocodile who is conscious of the joy of biting off hands (though Kipling's mugger also shares this delight). A Punch and Judy crocodile is for the ages five to eight, but Trivizas's crocodile is for all ages; it is a memorable reptile.

The crocodile, though, is an unsatisfied gourmet. He decides to eat a dentist's hand, so that he can boast of this new achievement to his friends. Accordingly, he pretends to have a toothache in order to entice the dentist to insert his hand just a little too far into that great jaw that people most fear and avoid.

The dentist, however, sees through the deception, removes all Cornelius's teeth, and replaces them with rubber dentures, so that he can never indulge in his aggressive hobby again. From now on, Cornelius has to confine himself to a diet of ripe bananas and scrambled slugs.

The idea of a dentist pulling out all one's teeth is another source of mock fear. No doubt some critic may object that such a story is undesirable because it might intensify the child's mistrust of dentists. On the contrary, the story renders the dentist funny by presenting his actions and their associated fears in an exaggerated, absurd, and distant way, such that they can be securely enjoyed. The story engages with fear and does not in any sense intensify it. To avoid fear, risk, and danger in stories for children is to deprive them of an entire category of humor and to isolate them from unavoidable elements of the real world and of children's own experiences. Maroulakis's illustrations help to render the encounter with a hand-eating crocodile innocuous, for at no point does he depict the actual eating of a hand but only the events leading up to it. His understated pictures match the humor of the text and enhance it through their small details, such as the serrated-teeth design of the front of Cornelius's car as he drives stealthily toward an unsuspecting official directing traffic.

We can further see Trivizas's mastery of monsters in his story O lemargos Tunelodrakos (The tunnel dragon), illustrated by Alexis Kyritsopoulos, a splendidly imaginative tale of a dragon who lives in far-away Trainidad and loves eating trains.

I like spaghetti made of sticks,

Hard-boiled bicycles, toasted bricks,

And well-smoked lorries aren't so bad,

But great long trains just drive me mad!

(Trivizas, O lemargos Tunelodrakos, 8)

The cunning tunnel dragon deceives little trains by lying down on the track and making them think that his wide-open mouth is a tunnel. When the trusting trains realize their mistake, it is too late, for they have been swallowed. The hero of the story is Chuff-Chuff, a clever little train who has just grown his fifth carriage and is about to celebrate his fifth birthday. Most of his friends are unable to come to his birthday party because they have been gobbled up by the enormous tunnel dragon. But, as we shall see, Chuff-Chuff has a brilliant idea of how to celebrate his birthday and at the same time get rid of the dragon.

Human-like trains are a well-established tradition in children's stories such as the little branch-line train from the Norfolk village of Little Snoring described by Graham Greene (The Little Train; New York: Doubleday, 1974), Thomas the Tank Engine (Wilbert Vere Awdry, Thomas the Tank Engine; London: Windmill Press, 1985), and Ivor the Engine (Oliver Postgate, Ivor the Engine; New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1962). In his train story, Trivizas once again plays with risk and danger as the trains disappear into the darkness of the dragon's mouth. Any child who has traveled in a train through a tunnel knows exactly how it feels as you are swallowed up and the sunny scenery and the steady sound of the track are replaced by darkness and rumbling echoes. For small children this can be frightening until once again light appears at the end of the tunnel. There is, though, no light at the end of a dragon, and the trains must stay in its dark stomach until rescued by the heroic engine Chuff-Chuff of Trainidad who rushes into the dragon's mouth and rallies the imprisoned trains into holding a birthday party for him. The noise, the dancing, and the lighting of candles on Chuff-Chuff's cake give the dragon indigestion, and he is forced to open his mouth and let the trains escape.