PEN World Voices Festival: Writing Humor for Kids, Seriously

After being cancelled last year, the PEN World Voices Festival returned in 2025 with dozens of in-person events in both New York City and Los Angeles. Fortunately, the panelists scheduled for the Children’s and Young Adult Books Committee’s panel last year — Cece Bell, Christopher Paul Curtis, Eugene Yelchin, and moderator Elizabeth Levy — agreed to come back this year, and their panel titled “Writing Humor for Kids, Seriously” was worth the wait!

The panel, from left, Elizabeth Levy, Eugene Yelchin, Christopher Paul Curtis, and Cece Bell.

The more than 60 people in attendance on a beautiful, unseasonably warm day in early May heard each of the panelists read passages from their work that highlighted their unique senses of humor. Author/illustrator Bell, who burst onto the kidlit scene with her acclaimed graphic-novel memoir El Deafo, showed images from her newest picture book Animal Albums from A to Z. It’s an alphabet book with made-up covers depicting a variety of critter musicians, their backstories, and hit albums. A QR code links to the actual songs that Bell wrote and set to music. Leading off is Tex-Mex accordionist Arnie Dillow, and much of the humor involves bodily functions (like stinky armpits) that never cease to delight young children. Attendees saw how picture books for the youngest readers work on multiple levels, as they also need to appeal to the caregivers, teachers, and librarians who will read those books over and over to the little ones. Thus, Animal Albums captures the nostalgia in decades of popular music from ragtime to jazz, from old-school rock to hip hop. And lots, lots more.

A mock album cover for the letter A.

Yelchin read from his memoir of growing up in the Soviet Union, The Genius Under the Table. He chose the opening chapter, when his family traveled from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) to Moscow in the mid-1960s for his older brother’s figure skating competition. They stood in line for hours to see Lenin’s Tomb while watching colorfully-clad tourists from the United States march inside without a wait. His mother made a fuss, testing the limits of the totalitarian regime’s tolerance, and when they finally went inside to see the perfectly preserved leader, young Yevgeny noticed a blemish — a piece of tape the size of the stick of gum the tourists had given his brother — below Lenin’s beard.* The horror!

A poster from Amazing Animals.

Curtis didn’t read a passage but talked about an episode from his own life that inspired the beginning of his debut middle grade novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963. Like Kenny’s older brother Byron, whose misbehavior leads their parents to send him to his grandmother in Alabama, the future author did poorly in school and got into a lot of trouble as a child. One thing his liked to do was light matches and watch them burn — the incident that gets Byron exiled down South in the first place — and he described his mother catching him with matches in the bathroom and hauling him by the nape of his neck  all the way to the living room to receive his punishment. Curtis’s novel portrays a tragedy — the KKK bombing of a church in Birmingham that killed four young girls — but he explained that humor is an antidote to tragedy. The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963 takes place at a difficult time in our country’s history, but the novel is above all a family story that he hopes will inspire readers to learn more about the history.

The moderator posed insightful questions for the panelists, beginning with “How do you find where the funny is?” Yelchin channeled his mother, who had a tendency to make scenes in public, in contrast to his father, who wanted to keep the family safe by staying under the radar. Like his mother, he tested the limits while living in the Soviet Union, a subject at the heart of the forthcoming YA crossover sequel to The Genius Under the Table, I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This. Bell said her work seeks to humanize deaf people like herself: “We have humor too,” she observed. Much of that humor comes from mishearing or misunderstanding. Curtis, who was bullied in both majority-Black and after integration majority-white schools, used humor to keep his tormentors off balance. He could gain power over bullies by making fun of them, even if it was only in his imagination and his writing.

The next moderator question was “How is humor a bulwark against complacency and mediocrity?” Yelchin explored humor as a defense mechanism in a closed, oppressive society. It was a way to feel better about a harsh situation, again gaining a bit of power over oppressive rulers by making fun of them.** But humor could easily turn into irony or cynicism which implied acceptance of the lies under which people in this closed society lived. People who refused to accept the lies and conform to them were frequently imprisoned in psychiatric institutions, which is a subject of Yelchin’s forthcoming graphic-novel memoir. Bell remarked that bullies often use humor, a lazy kind of humor that involves making fun of people with disabilities. Curtis added that bully humor is cruel, targeting people who are already hurting or preyed on. It’s laughing at people in pain, but it’s often the most popular type of humor even though it hurts vulnerable people.***

Levy followed up the answers with the question, “Have you had moments that your characters hurt someone with a joke?” Yelchin spoke about the antisemitism he endured in the Soviet Union, even from his friends, which made its way in to his middle grade memoir. His friends’ cruelty made him ashamed to be Jewish, a feeling he deals with more than 50 years later. Curtis observed that “a joke is only funny the first time,” and he has come to realize that some of the jokes he thought were funny years ago are no longer so now. Yelchin decried the censorship in children’s books and says there has to be a middle ground. Artists are “here to offend.” Bell said that she no longer uses the terms “nuts” and “crazy” because these words are likely to be misinterpreted or experienced as hurtful by young readers. Yelchin countered, objecting to the policing of language and the use of sensitivity readers, so we had a bit of a debate before Levy asked the next question.

Which was, “What is the joy in the work that we do?” For Curtis, it was when a person tells him how much his work has meant to them, especially an adult who’d read his books in fifth grade and still remembered and cherished them. Yelchin said his work is a way “to connect to who I was when I was ten.” And Bell appreciates knowing her books have made someone laugh.

As if on cue, the first audience question was from a young Black woman who’d read and appreciated The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963 in fifth grade even though she was not initially enthusiastic. She, like Curtis, went to a predominantly white school and feared the scrutiny of her classmates for yet another book about Black pain and struggle. Curtis underscored the importance of books with Black characters that express joy and humor, and that are above all, about the common experience of life with family and friends.

The following audience question was about book bans and how the authors keep their energy and creativity at a time when books are being banned. Levy answered that writers and readers are a community that has come together to oppose book banning. PEN America is one part of that community. Yelchin pointed out that when books were banned in the Soviet Union, they became interesting. More people wanted to read them. As writers, we create works for the people who are curious, who would go out of their way or take a big risk to read a book that had been banned. Curtis’s books have been banned and said that no matter the content or the author’s intention, book banners will always find a reason to remove a book.

Curtis signs books after the event.

Thank you to the panelists, the audience, and PEN America for this thoughtful session. It was a great follow-up to the 2023 panel on writing truthfully about today’s issues, and I look forward to next year’s panel at the 2026 PEN World Voices Festival.

* Czechoslovakia’s first communist dictator, Klement Gottwald, arranged to have his body preserved for display in the National Memorial at Vitkov Park in Prague in much the same way Lenin (and later, Stalin) did. Unfortunately for him and for no one else, the doctors who handled his body after his death in 1953 did so incorrectly. By 1961 the despot’s corpse had rotted away, at which point it was sent to the rendering plant cremated.

**As a personal note, I appreciate the parallels here between individual bullying, what goes on in schools for instance, and societal bullying, carried out by those in power. It’s something I’ve written and talked a lot about.

***Although the panelists didn’t cite the great comedian George Carlin, his definition of and distinction between “punch up” and “punch down” humor is relevant here.