Whilst I was teaching, I always found that books like Captain Underpants would keep their readers hooked for a couple of years until they’d eventually exhaust all of them and want to move on to something else.
If your child has been howling at Captain Underpants, these are the five books I’d line up next. Dog Man, Franny K. Stein, Prince Not-So Charming, Undead Pets and Benjamin Blank are all silly from the first page.
They’re filed at age 6 or 7 in the app, and our funny books for 7 year olds shelf has more like them.
What’s in a Captain Underpants book
George and Harold are best friends who are nearly always in trouble. Harold draws, George makes up the stories, and their grumpy head teacher, Mr Krupp, hates the comics they sell in the playground.
It reads like a comic and a chapter book at once. Some chapters are only a few words long, most pages have a drawing on them, and the big fights are in Flip-E-Rama, where you flick between two pages to make the picture move. So what works next is anything daft from page one that a child can race through.
More Captain Underpants comes first, of course, and we have ten of them. The Adventures of Captain Underpants is where Mr Krupp first ends up in his pants with a red curtain for a cape. In Attack of the Talking Toilets, the boys’ new comic comes to life on the school brainiac’s machine and out climb toilets chanting YUM, YUM, EAT ‘EM UP! All ten are on the Dav Pilkey page.
Five books like Captain Underpants
Dog Man by Dav Pilkey
Dog Man
Officer Knight is tough but not very bright. Greg the dog is clever but can’t drive a car. When Petey, the town’s evil cat, leaves them a bomb, a nurse sews Greg’s head onto the officer’s body and Dog Man is born. He’s a brilliant cop who still licks the chief’s face and naps on his new couch.
It’s by Dav Pilkey too, and the whole book is meant to be made by George and Harold, so it’s comics from start to finish, with their spelling and their Flip-E-Rama pages. It’s four short adventures, and in the last one a hot dog raises an army of tiny sausages. We have three Dog Man books and Dog Man: Unleashed is the second. My what age is Dog Man for guide says more about who it suits.
Franny K. Stein: Lunch Walks Among Us by Jim Benton
Franny K. Stein 1 – Lunch Walks Among Us
Franny lives in a pretty pink house on Daffodil Street, but her bedroom has test tubes, a tarantula cage and a tank of flying piranhas. She’s new at school and the other children are a bit scared of her. Her teacher suggests she treats making friends like an experiment.
Meanwhile the crab ravioli she threw in the classroom bin has been sitting next to some old gym shoes and a dollop of industrial waste. The chapter headings are terrible puns, and one poor boy keeps wetting his pants, which some children will think is the best joke in the book.
Prince Not-So Charming: Once Upon a Prank by Roy L. Hinuss
Prince Not-So Charming 1 – Once Upon a Prank
Carlos Charles Charming comes from two thousand years of brave, serious Prince Charmings, and all he wants is to make his dad laugh. His jester routine in the throne room goes wrong in every way it can, eggs included. So the king sends him off in a suit of armour, pushing a wheelbarrow of weapons he can barely lift, to slay a dragon in a forest full of quicksand.
It’s a shorter read than Captain Underpants and the jokes are mostly farts and boogers.
Undead Pets: Return of the Hungry Hamster by Sam Hay
Undead Pets 1 – Return of the Hungry Hamster
Joe is desperate for a dog, but his mum sneezes at the word pet. Then his great-uncle Charlie brings home a jackal-shaped amulet from Egypt that grants one wish. Joe wishes for a pet and gets Dumpling, a zombie hamster who’s green round the edges and whose eyeball pops out when he sneezes.
Nobody else can see Dumpling, so when he eats socks, pens and the headmaster’s packed lunch, Joe gets the blame. Dumpling died in an accident with a vacuum cleaner before the book starts. It happens off the page and it’s treated as a joke, but a child whose own pet died recently might not be ready to laugh at it.
The Shark-Headed Bear-Thing by Barry Hutchison
The Shark-Headed Bear-Thing
Benjamin Blank lives in the village of Lump with his uncle Tavish, a blacksmith whose breakfast machine fires a hot egg at Ben’s head and shoots the toast through the roof. When a small, very cross girl called Paradise Little turns up needing a warrior, Ben is the only one going. On the way they find a boy who has been dangling off a rope bridge since Tuesday and says he’s a wizard.
A troll challenges Ben to a game called Burp or Death, and a slice of toast knocks the hero out.
Four more silly ones
The Bad Guys is Mr Wolf trying to turn a snake, a piranha and a shark into good guys, starting with a kitten stuck up a tree. Nearly every page is one big picture, so it goes fast.
In Attack of the Tighty Whities!, George Brown’s magic super burp keeps taking over his arms, legs and mouth in the week of the county spelling bee. We have eighteen George Brown books. If it’s the trouble they love more than the jokes, there’s plenty of it in books like Horrid Henry.
Crazy Case of Missing Thunder is the first Goofballs mystery. The gang dress up as bushes to spy in a flower shop and get sprayed with a hose.
In Ghost Buddy: Zero to Hero, Billy Broccoli moves into a bedroom with ponies on the wallpaper and finds a ghost already living in it. Billy is nearly twelve, so this one suits the older end.
When they want something a bit longer
Stitch Head is filed at 8. He’s a mad professor’s very first creation, forgotten in the dungeon of Castle Grotteskew, until a three-armed Creature decides he’s its BESTEST friend. There are monsters everywhere, but the frights are the silly sort.
Zombie Bums from Uranus is also filed at 8, and it’s for the child who thinks bum is the funniest word in the world. Andy Griffiths has invented bumcanos and a planet whose rings are made of frozen bums. If they already love the Treehouse books, my books like the 13-Storey Treehouse list follows on.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a longer diary with drawings all the way through, and I’ve also put together what to read after Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
Just so you know…
Every book I’ve mentioned is in Little Reads. It’s a children’s library app with 3,000+ hand-picked books, and it costs £7.99 a month after a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. A free account comes with 100+ free books.
There are no reading levels in Little Reads and no adverts. It’s a library for the child who has finished Captain Underpants and wants something just as silly next.