Bruce Degen, Who Drew ‘The Magic School Bus,’ Dies at 79
Bruce Degen signing a poster at a book store in Minneapolis. He collaborated on 14 books in the “Magic School
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ONE OF MY MORE popular tweets fits squarely into the Bad Dad Joke genre. An image from Dr. Seuss‘s book sees a father sitting in a chair, a glum look on his face. His three children discuss their father’s plight in that familiar singsong cadence: “Dad is sad. Very, very sad. He had a bad day. What a day Dad had!” I took a photo of the image, pausing in the middle of reading my daughter a book so I could fire off a funny tweet. I posted the photo with my comment, composed in the run-on sentence style of Twitter humor: “Wow @ me next time, Dr Seuss.” Sad dad! That was me! Laugh at my expense! And laugh they did. The tweet quickly racked up more than a hundred likes. I was so pleased with it that I made it my pinned tweet for a few years. Anyone who visited my profile immediately saw that I was a dad, and that, being an enlightened male of the 21st century, I possessed a healthy sense of humor about the whole endeavor. Who wouldn’t want to smash that follow button? I was also, at a level I didn’t fully appreciate, following a script. The Bad Dad Joke, as it exists across social media, hews to a specific set of criteria: make fun of yourself, but don’t get too dark; always portray yourself, never the other members of your family, as the fool; defer to your wife, the one who has it together. The Bad Dad Joke is defined as much by what it leaves out as what it includes. Fear, rage, self-aggrandizement. By leaving out those unsavory, even potentially toxic, elements, even the great Dr. Seuss fails to fully capture the dad’s struggles. Where are those struggles supposed to go? Is that what podcasts are for? These are some of the questions Lucas Mann asks in his new book, Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances. Mann is an essayist and memoirist who […]
Click here to view original page at Bad Dad Jokes: On Lucas Mann’s “Attachments”
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Bruce Degen signing a poster at a book store in Minneapolis. He collaborated on 14 books in the “Magic School
“Didion & Babitz” presents Joan Didion (left) and Eve Babitz as “two halves of American womanhood.” DIDION & BABITZ ,
