“I want to read the duck book”, said the 8 year old. “No”, I said. I knew that Foul Language would make him laugh due to some of the illustrations. He’s also a great reader, because of that the written jokes are ones that he could say aloud. It’s because of that reason that Fowl Language has its place on my book shelf that the kids can’t borrow from. The book has some choice, possibly profane language that you don’t want your kids repeating. However, for parents, Fowl Language is incredibly funny. It’s the kind of laugh out loud funny that moms and dads will share with each other and then laugh at the other’s kids and say “Your kids do that!”.
Fowl Language, by Brian Gordon is a fabulous play on words. The lead character is a duck, there’s a pink girl daughter duck, blue boy son duck and a duck wife that makes an appearance in a couple of the comics. None of the ducks have names, but they’re immediately distinguishable in the way they look, especially the dad.
His eyes range from black dots to large circles with black dots and finally large circles with black dots and eyebrows. Written like that it doesn’t seem like that wide of a range of emotions. However, when paired with Gordon’s illustrations readers can see the joy, frustration and confusion that the father duck goes through.
This is droll humor that people who don’t get dry humor will get. A great example of this is my wife. Before meeting me her ability find dry humor or those with droll personalities funny. Now that we’re a decade into this great experiment she enjoys it very much. She also wasn’t familiar with Fowl Language.
I gave her the book and immediately heard her laughing from the other side of the bathroom door. Then, I took the book from her, lay in bed and showed her my favorite pages. She started laughing that I was laughing so hard and now I’m laughing so hard that I’m snorting in the coffee shop as I write this.
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