So relatively recently, Jeff Kinney released the eleventh Diary of a Wimpy Kid novel.
Yes, you read that correctly, ELEVEN Diary of a Wimpy Kid books.
Talk about not knowing how to branch out.
I haven't read this most recent edition of Jeff Kinney's one and only cash cow, but I honestly doubt it'll be any good. This is coming from a guy who stuck around long after everyone else stopped caring about Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I've read all ten books preceding the latest, an achievement that is either really impressive or really terrifying.
Which raises the question: something good had to be in there, right? Why else would it have been so well received by the general public that Kinney felt the need to extend the series long past its prime?
That's the question that I will attempt to answer today.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I implore you to read on in earnest as I do my best to chronicle the rise and fall of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
THE RISE:
I don't know if anybody remembers, but when the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid came out, it was a pretty big game-changer.
It was such a fresh idea at the time: take a kid who has a general disdain for school and effort in general and detail a perspective piece about middle school and being an older child through this cynical lens.
The first novel worked particularly well because it was just the right combination of humor, character, and wit to keep audiences entertained and even relate at some level at what main protagonist Greg Heffley was going through.
Diary novels live and die by their main protagonists, and Greg Heffley was a very, very good one.
Kinney captured just the right blend of child and adult when it came to creating Greg Heffley. Greg is a selfish, underachieving, apathetic cynic who thrives on playing video games and being successful by doing as little as possible. He's also really skinny and short, not quite old enough to be hitting puberty. In short, Greg Heffley is quite literally a wimpy kid.
Yet Greg is also not a complete fool. He sort of recognizes the definitive stupidity that middle school encapsulates. On the first few pages of the first novel, he details that the idea of middle school was kind of dumb in the first place, combining children who haven't hit puberty yet with teenagers armed with growth spurts and peach fuzz with the capability to intimidate and terrorize any child they choose.
Greg's criticisms also extend to include familiarities to veterans of the middle school world including needlessly complicated and overly politically correct rule systems, reading groups which are either too easy or too much work, and the army of really stupid kids around him.
As Greg puts hit himself, "I'm gonna be famous one day, but right now, I'm stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons."
You find yourself agreeing with a lot of what Greg is saying, whether you actually want to or not.
However, Greg is also a child, so a large part of his perspective comes from an immature position. For example, in the first novel, he details of a school legend known as the Cheese Touch, which occured when a student found some moldy cheese on a blacktop, touched it, and started chasing other students around. If you got touched with someone with the Cheese Touch, you would then receive the Cheese Touch, and if you couldn't give it to someone else, you basically lived in walking isolation from the rest of the student body.
Greg greatly fears getting the Cheese Touch, to the point where he taped his fingers in a crossed position, as crossing your fingers was the only immunity to the Cheese Touch, which caused him to get a D in Handwriting.
Is it immature and silly? Yes, but Greg is also a middle school boy, so this sort of behavior is perfectly understandable.
Greg is both the perfect combination of observant and clueless, the resulting character being one who can see what's going on around them, and then either understand it or completely miss the point.
He's a really likable character.
Another big advantage of the books in the early years was the exaggerated humor.
Every part of Greg's life, from his family to his interactions with other students to his school, is, at its core, relatively pedestrian. However, Kinney exaggerates the odder elements of this type of existence to provide wacky but oddly relatable humor to his audience.
For example, everybody's got that kind of weird kid for a neighbor, right? However, Greg has Fregley, who yells "JUICE!" when he has to go to the bathroom, digs holes in his yard and sits in them, and strips naked behind a tree. Yes, this is all ridiculous and over-the-top, but it's based in something familiar: a kooky neighbor.
It's this sort of familiarity in combination with the ridiculousness that makes the humor work. We understand and relate to the relatable parts, and the ridiculous parts come out of nowhere as an unexpected twist that can make us laugh. It's weird and out there yet oddly familiar.
These characteristics were what made the original Diary of a Wimpy Kid and the first few of its sequels to be as funny and great as they were. So, what went wrong?
THE FALL:
The subsequent sequels following the originals were pretty good. Not as good as the original, but still inherently awesome.
However it was around book 5 and 6 that Jeff Kinney started running out of ideas and jokes.
Book 6 was really the breaking point in the series. It focuses on Greg being snowed in with his family, but also on him thinking he's on the run from the law because he vandalized his school on accident. These premises sort of conflict and are really too stupid to take seriously and too odd to be funny.
This sort became the overall problem with the latter books in the series. The humor became less funny and more tired. It became less based on relatability and more on just utter weirdness.
To sum up, Kinney started trying way too hard to be funny by being ridiculous without really trying to be relatable anymore.
For example, in book 6, Greg talks about how before his younger brother was born he got a baby doll to take care of as in preparation for his brother's arrival. Not a bad premise for a joke, but then Kinney shows that Greg gets overly attached to the thing, to the point that when he lost the doll he freaked out and tried replacing it with a grapefruit, which Greg also gets attached to.
Somewhere along that discourse the humor was lost and was replaced by random weirdness, which can be humorous, but it wasn't necessarily what Diary of a Wimpy Kid was famous for.
Also the plots of the books themselves became very boring, mostly because they became less about Greg coming-of-age and more about just a single gimmick.
The latest one, Book 10, was about Greg pledging to give up technology, but nothing of substance really happens because of this. I honestly don't remember how the book had Greg's character deal with this unwelcome change because it was so bland and nondescript.
Overall, the latter books in the series sort of became this mush of mediocrity and boredom trying desperately to recapture what made the series so great in the first place.
Bland, boring, and boorish, the later novels have made the Wimpy Kid Series become the children's book version of SpongeBob, The Fairly Oddparents, or The Simpsons. It's a tired out schtick made by people who long stopped caring, and it just needs to die already.
Hopefully Kinney will get the message after this one and just write something new.
Unless he doesn't and Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Big Whatever comes out later this year.
No one is immune to the allure of the almighty dollar it seems.
