It’s my pleasure to kick off the blog tour for Aliens made me do it by David Macphail! Today, David has written a piece about the comic appeal of aliens! It’s a brilliant blog and a fantastic book- do check it out!
What is the comic appeal of aliens?
Comedy loves a “fish out of water.” Put a character somewhere they don’t belong, and the laughs pile in. Children’s books are full of such characters: Alice tumbling into Wonderland, Charlie stepping inside Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, even Paddington Bear politely blundering through London with his marmalade sandwiches. Sometimes the hero is the outsider; sometimes, as with the BFG meeting the Queen, it’s the other way round. Either way, confusion and misunderstanding become fuel for comedy.
And aliens? They’re the ultimate outsiders—literally from another planet.
In my new book, Aliens Made Me Do It, two purple-haired extraterrestrials—Prince Perseus and Princess Cassiopeia—drag their ridiculous intergalactic feud down to Earth. They see queues as strange human rituals and buses as giant metal beasts packed with unruly savages. Meanwhile, our Earth kids, Hillman and Roz, are just as lost when they get swept up into the drama of the aliens’ half-and-half galactic empire.
Fun comes from misunderstandings. We think custard belongs on pudding. Perseus and Cassiopeia think it belongs in their weapons arsenal. We think dancing like a chicken in public is mortifying. For them, it’s a solemn victory dance handed down by generations of space royalty.
Aliens flip our normal upside down. They turn the ordinary into the ridiculous—and vice versa. And in the end, they remind us of something wonderfully silly: life on Earth is pretty darned weird, whether you look at it through alien eyes or not.
My Shelves Are Full 