Captain Underpants

Today is set aside to “Run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.” The concept behind the day, and the phrase, is to get people to try out a new idea. But often for children, these sayings take on literal meanings, such as in Jerry Spinelli’s Who Ran My Underwear Up a Flagpole.

For me today, January 2 is a day for a new idea—a day of surrender. I have avoided talking about Captain Underpants for thirteen long years. Male friends have teased me about it. Male journalists decried the fact that I did not include it in 100 Best Books for Children. Even when I borrowed the book from the Westwood Public Library, one of the librarians said, “I never thought I would see you check this out.”

But while I have been avoiding this book, the Captain Underpants series have sold more than forty million copies, they have made children who think they hate books become readers, and they have made the author a household name. One of the standing jokes in publishing is that if you want to create a bestseller for children you should include flatulence, bodily functions, or underwear in the title. Comedic genius Dav Pilkey knew this a long time before publishers discovered it. Still in touch with the kind of child that he was—“getting into trouble for pulling pranks, cracking jokes, and making silly comic books”—he invented his famous character in second grade. Fortunately, he didn’t listen to the teacher who told him to straighten up “because you can’t spend the rest of your life making silly books.” As an adult he returned to that character—Captain Underpants.

In the first book in the series, The Adventures of Captain Underpants, published in 1997, readers meet the two anti-heroes George Beard and Harold Hutchins. The two BFF’s find endless ways to create mayhem and end up spending more time with the principal, Mr. Krupp, than their teachers. After buying a 3-D Hypno-Ring, they hypnotize Mr. Krupp, causing him to run around town in his underpants and cape because he believes himself to be Captain Underpants.

The book contains so much silly, even gross, humor and action-filled drawings that young readers finish an entire book without meaning to. So if you know a young reader, ages six through ten, who thinks books have to be boring, you might as well surrender. Your solution will be the ever-growing series—“lots of fun, lots of laffs”—first created in the mind of a prank-playing second grader. Today I am running Captain Underpants up the flagpole. We’ll see if anyone salutes him.

Here’s a page from The Adventures of Captain Underpants: