Keeping Things Sideways to Expectations: A Q&A with Bill Canterbury on the My Life Is Weird Series

I was having a serious conversation with my husband the other day where we attempted to figure out some percentages in terms of which shows out there make it into our speech patterns. And The Simpsons (for all that it is inexplicably still playing on TV to this day) has gotta consist of a good 75% of our vocab. Who is to blame/credit for this? In part, today’s featured guest. Mr. Bill Canterbury worked on the early Simpsons (a.k.a. the best Simpsons) then went on to work on other various shows and video games. His latest venture involves, as you might imagine, picture books. Or, as he described it to me, “the first book is My Dad is a Unicorn. Yes, Margaret Wise Brown somewhere just clenched her fists.” That comes out on April 1st alongside My Mom Is a Mermaid, with My Teacher is a Dinosaur out in June.

Now we’ve seen humor writers working in both television and picture books before. Folks like B.J. Novak and Bess Kalb. But I don’t know those people. I know this person. So this person is the one I’m gonna talk to about the relationship between those two professions today:

---

Betsy Bird: Bill! Buddy! Pal! Thanks so much for talking with me about your nutty new series, My Life is Weird. So let’s start from the beginning. You’re a former Simpsons writer responsible for some of my favorite episodes (“Marge on the Lam” comes immediately to mind) and while you are not the first Simpsons writer to write picture books for kids (Mike Reiss used to crank ’em out like clockwork) I would say that yours definitely tap into that Simpsons humor and mindset.

Bill Canterbury: Betsy! Hi! We’re equal fans of exclamation marks! They’re the hot sauce of punctuation. We should transcribe this whole interview using only exclamation marks so readers wonder why we yelled at each other the entire time.

The Simpsons mindset you mention, it’s sort of absurdity and rule-breaking and always keeping things sideways to expectations, and being clever and dumb at the same time. Doctors call it nerdial dumbosis.

My editor at Random House, Frances Gilbert, is wickedly smart and funny. Sometimes she’ll read a line I’ve written and tell me that it is one of the strangest or stupidest things that she’s ever read, but at the same time she’ll also be laughing. That’s kind of Simpsons humor. The most off-kilter lines in the series are usually my favorites.

BB: Oh yeah. And for the sake of my readers I will abstain from making a list of my favorites right here and now (but the temptation is real). So how’d you come up with the MY LIFE IS WEIRD series to begin with? As someone who regularly horrifies her 13-year-old daughter by playing the Sirius Radio 90s station (I will never, not ever, move the dial away from Macy Gray) I felt this book deep in my soul.

Bill: Well, your daughter is right about 90s music. Her horror is real. The My Life is Weird series is anchored on that universal sentiment kids develop that their parents are the strangest and most embarrassing people on earth. It happens when kids begin school and their worlds suddenly widen, and they now see comparisons to their own small world. The My Life is Weird books take it farther to where their parent or teacher or sibling happens to be a mythical creature. Kids like to see something very bizarre within a normal and familiar setting. Also, My Dad is a Unicorn! plays better than My Dad Wears Shorts and Has Knobby Knees.

Specifically, the concept came from personal experience. When my youngest son was in elementary school, I’d wait for him at his school entrance every afternoon and then we’d happily walk home together, chatting about our days or making up stories about dolphins taking over Los Angeles. But then one day he told me to start waiting at a distance from his school. He would still happily walk home with me, but only if no one witnessed it.

I’d wait every afternoon out at my prescribed border line, fifty yards from the school, and there was another parent who also had been told by her child to wait there. She was a little farther back, maybe sixty yards. I took pride in her having been told to wait farther out than I had.

BB: Take your victories where you can, man. Now as you yourself have mentioned, picture books and your particular brand of dialogue-reliant TV show writing seem to have some distinct similarities. In your case, one tends to inform the other. How do they compare? And would you say the editing process is similar at all?

Bill: I’ve written for many animated and live action TV series and so my instincts are to dialogue. Dialogue and exciting car chases, but dialogue first. I like learning about characters by what they say and how and why they say it. Much of humor isn’t in characters’ actions but in their reactions, and spoken reactions can abruptly upend readers’ expectations when the dialogue is askew to the context or to conventions.

The My Life is Weird series is in a comics format, with speech bubbles and panels. Bubble dialogue allowed me to keep rewriting as sketches arrived from the illustrator, Jeff Harter. He sometimes composed characters or framed scenes in ways far funnier than I envisioned, and so I would change the dialogue to play off of his work. Animated shows are like that, where the art gets locked before the voiceovers. Dialogue can keep being adjusted well into the creation process.

BB: Well, you’ve already broached the topic here, so let’s talk for a second about your illustrator. Jeff Harter does some pretty great interpretations of the gags you’ve got going on in these books (the lasagna noodle-shaped typography on the word “Lasagna”? *chef’s kiss*). I’m going to assume you didn’t know Jeff prior to this collaboration. How do you think he did in the end?

I knew Jeff’s work but not him personally. He’s so inventive and he’s always coming up with subtle easter eggs and quirky details, like that lasagna font. I wrote a bit in My Dad is a Unicorn! where a troll has stolen a lollipop from a unicorn. That’s it. Jeff came back with a two-page spread that has a 50-foot high Lord Fauntleroy lollipop being dragged by a delirious troll with pinwheeling eyes. It’s marvelous. Kids might stop reading and try to lick the lollipop. We should have used flavored inks.

BB: Nom. Now don’t take this the wrong way but your books in the MY LIFE IS WEIRD series? They are nice and weird. Putting aside the logistics of how precisely human kids have ended up with mermaid and unicorn parents (I have my theories but they’re probably not appropriate for a children’s literature-related site) tell me about weirdness. Why do you, personally, think it’s important for kids to get a regular dose of the weirds?

Bill: Take the wrong way? I LOVE hearing that from you, Betsy! Weird is a hard word to lasso though. Travis Jonker at 100 Scopes Notes posts lists of “unconventional” books, and you’ve written before that you gratefully adopted it from him for your own year-end list of odd books. I like that word, “unconventional.” It encompasses many things that are unique and strange, off-kilter, things that break rules.

Children like quirkiness! They like having their imaginations sparked, and to feel things a bit haywire. They don’t always want their own world explained to them, sometimes they want a new world that can’t be explained.

When strangeness in a book feels authentically connected to a distinct author voice and worldview, that’s a magical journey. Kids dig that. When my parents gave me Edward Gorey for the first time, my mind blew up. I felt like an author had invited me into their unique brain.

Some funny and weird books I adore are My Parents Won’t Stop Talking, Meet the Super Duper Seven, and A Tree for Mr. Fish. They’re askew and absurd but feel artistically genuine. The artists have singular voices and find unique rhythms for humor.

BB: You had me at your love for My Parents Won’t Stop Talking. That thing was brilliant. All right, hard hitting question now. They can’t all be softballs, after all. What is your favorite gag in these books? Because personally I’m torn between the kid whose dad is into the obscure team The Denver Doorbells (Jeff Harter went above and beyond with that one) and the mom who gives her daughter back-up shoelaces, just in case.

Bill: My favorite might be in the third book in our My Life is Weird series, My Teacher is a Dinosaur! There’s a page in there where a dull human teacher takes her students on a field trip to the even duller “Museum of Buttons.” She shows them a button and says, “Does anyone know what you call a button that’s brown? Anyone? Anyone? It’s called a brown button.” That’s very stupid, and it’s not even clear that it’s a joke. It’s anti-humor, yet it plays very funny, and Jeff’s illustration of  the glassy-eyed kids is wonderful.

On one level that page is relatable to kids who’ve ever been bored stiff. And for older readers, the dialogue plays off of the Ben Stein teacher character in Ferris Bueller who drones on about the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. “Anyone? Anyone?” The page will appeal to economics professors who hate buttons. It’s a niche audience.

BB: So will we be seeing any future MY LIFE IS WEIRD books in your future? Are you taking suggestions for new magical creatures? Cause personally I’m pushing for the Jersey Devil (he never gets enough attention).

Bill: Ha! My editor Frances and I have a long list of potential books to extend the series that we can’t wait to start on, but somehow the Jersey Devil was overlooked. I’d love to pitch that straight-faced to her. She’d throw her phone at me.

BB: Worth it, man. Worth it.

---

I just want to thank Bill for taking the time to come on over (so to speak) and answer my questions here today. No doubt we’ll be seeing more of him in the future. As I mentioned before My Dad is a Unicorn and My Mom Is a Mermaid are out April 1st, with My Teacher is a Dinosaur out June 3rd. Look for them then!

Filed under: Interviews