Behind the Bum: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Andy Griffiths’ Bum Trilogy

Abstract

Anal jokes abound in Andy Griffiths’ trilogy of novels for children, The Day My Bum Went Psycho (2001)1, Zombie Bums From Uranus (2003) and Bumageddon (2005). The titles of the second and third volumes give a fair idea of the quality and makeup of these jokes: they generally take the form either of double entendres (Uranus or “your anus”, a joke likely to be lost on American readers because in the USA “anus” is a taboo word and Uranus is therefore mispronounced “urinous”) or anal transmogrifications of common words (Bumageddon for Armageddon). Such jokes can be found on almost every page of the trilogy, sometimes more than once on a page. To date, Griffiths’ Bum trilogy has received scant critical attention with the exception of Yvonne Hammer’s ‘Interrogating the Humanist subject in Carnivalesque Quest Novels’ (2006); but its extreme focus on matters anal in both wordplay and plot invites scrutiny from those theoretical perspectives that take an interest in the scatalogical. In this paper I shall be considering the trilogy’s fondness for anal jokes and bums from three such perspectives, those of Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva and Sigmund Freud.