ROCK PAPER SCISSORS CHEESE

In this collaboration from comedian Bell and Go the Fuck to Sleep (2011) author Mansbach, a grumpy family attempts to find some fun.

“It was raining, and had been / for what felt like forever. / And the Bell family found themselves / cooped up together.” Before the family—who resemble co-author Bell, his real-life wife, and their three daughters—can drive one another bonkers, the youngest Bell has a brainstorm: “Sometimes, she thought, / nothing else quite delivers / like the old-school fun / of rock, paper, scissors.” Two sisters give the classic hand game a whirl, which leads to a standoff that’s interrupted when their older sister informs them that they’re playing the game wrong: In addition to “rock,” “paper,” and “scissors,” there’s “hitchhiker” (“Paper beats hitchhiker…because it’s an unpaid parking ticket”), “coyote” (“Coyote beats hitchhiker; she can just bite him”), and so on. The whole family gets into the spirit, introducing increasingly preposterous variables to the game, including “Primetime Emmy!” (Bell has several.) The good rhymes harbor a good message about beating the doldrums by flexing one’s creative muscles. Chambers’ cartoony art captures both the story’s intrafamilial tenderness and the siblings’ stir-craziness, which is often shown to (one assumes) exaggerated effect, as when a raging sister roller-skates through the house wielding an electric guitar that’s on fire. Like their real-life counterparts, Dada is Black, Mama is white, and the children are biracial.

An amusing paean to the remedial possibilities of creative thinking.