Freud tells us that jokes are never really innocent and that they are designed to serve aggressive or self-defensive purposes. There’s a little bit of both in Adam Mansbach’s bedtime story for adults trying to get children to sleep.
Samantha Murphy writes: TechNewsDaily spoke with Mansbach and illustrator Ricardo Cortes about how social media shot “Go the F**k to Sleep” (Akashic Books, 2011) to No. 1 on Amazon’s best seller list a month ahead of its publication and how the book’s message has captured the hearts of parents with a sense of humor everywhere.
http://www.technewsdaily.com/social-medi…
Here’s a sample verse:
The cats nestle close to their kittens now.
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You’re cozy and warm in your bed, my dear
Please go the f**k sleep.
Shades of “Down will come baby, cradle, and all.” In a study of lullabies, Nicholas Tucker concluded that some of the melodies sung to children over the centuries were “exercises in controlled hatred.” One British lullaby warns a “squalling baby” that Bonaparte will “beat you, beat you, beat you, / And he’ll beat you all to pap. / And he’ll eat you, eat you, eat you / Every morsel snap, snap, snap.”
Why does the word “desperate” come up so often when parents describe the experience of reading their children to sleep?
It calls to mind Lewis Carroll’s scene in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when Alice watches in amazement as the Dutchess dandles her baby:
And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line:
“Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes;
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.”
Chorus: “Wow! wow! wow!”
While the Dutchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words–
“I speak severely to my boy,
I beat him when he sneezes;
For he can thoroughly enjoy
The pepper when he pleases!”
Chorus: “Wow! wow! wow!”
Thanks for the Alice example. The shocker here is that we have not just verbal abuse, but physical abuse as well, with the Dutchess “tossing the baby violently up and down.” Of course, maybe it is really a pig, but still.