Butt of the Joke: Chicken Butt! by Erica Perl

"You know what?

"What?"

"CHICKEN BUTT!"

"You know why?"

"Why?"

"CHICKEN THIGH!"

"You know how?

"How?"

CHICKEN EYEBROW!"

Yeah, yeah, yeah! It's the silliest, the stupidest, the downright BOTTOM for schoolboy schoolyard jokes, all dressed up with those irresistibly goofy, googly-eyed chickens that illustrator Henry Cole conjures up, and it's just plain fun for the reader, slapstick verbal humor which will knock kids back on their keisters abounds in such lines as

"You know where?"

"Where?" (from the disgusted but still determinedly patient dad)

"CHICKEN UNDERWEAR!"

Erica Perl's Chicken Butt! (Abrams, 2009) even gives the youthful jokester the last line, the sorta surprising switch to "MONKEY BUTT!" in her salute to wordplay (or we might say fowl play,) one of what was a humongous harvest of heiny humor in 2009. Along with Black's cheery Chicken Cheeks (see my earlier review here) and Halliday's happyfest, Always Lots of Heinies at the Zoo (reviewed here), 2009 was a banner year for bottoms, so we might as well let Erica Perl's latest have its, um, seat at this table. As one reviewer says, "Warning: Kids will want to read this one over and over and over again! An unhinged piece of slap-happy rhyming…rocket-propelled artwork… the romp is a powerful piece of cacophony, more frenetic by the moment."