How Dahl Uses Humor in his Books Boy and Georges Marvellous Medicine to Manipulate the Reader's Perception of Events that Occur

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“Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.” (Dahl et al., 2013). Roald Dahl is well known for someone who loves to use humour in his story books to make children and even grownups laugh until their tummies heart. In the following essay there is going to be looked at how Dahl uses humour in his books Boy and Georges Marvellous Medicine to manipulate the reader’s perception of events that occur.
You can write about anything for children as long as you’ve got humour (Dahl et al., 2014) In Boy, Dahl makes use of humour to change certain events that occurred to be quite serious to be rather humorous. He does this by using persuasive language such as sarcasm, hyperbole, short sentence, imagery, similes and juxtaposition. (rose96 et al., 2011). When Dahl visits the doctor he makes use of exaggeration to describe the amount of flesh as blood that came out of his mouth from his adenoids that got taken out. "...out of my mouth into the basin came tumbling a whole mass of flesh and blood” (Dahl, 2011:66). Another example of exaggeration is when he describes the Boazers at Repton as people who “had the power of life and death” over them (Dahl, 2011:144). Here the reader can see some frightening parts of Dahl’s life but are still able to enjoy the book because he makes it so humorous. Another incident in Boy that was humorous was the incident with the mouse and Mrs Pratchett. This was obviously something Dahl would never forget as a child. Although it was a really funny and enjoyable incident it let to him being beat so bad by Mr Coombes that his mother took him out of the Llandaff Cathedral school and sent him to a board...

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...tto. 2013. StudyMode. Georges Marvellous Medicine Essay [Online]. Available: http://www.studymode.com/essays/Georges-Marvellous-Medicine-Essay-1551506.html [2014, May 19].
One upon a bookcase. Roald Dahl Day: Dahl's Favourite Themes. 2013. [Online]. Available: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.onceuponabookcase.co.uk/2013/09/roald-dahl-day-dahls-favourite-themes.html [2014, May 19].
ROALD DAHL’S STYLE OF WRITING. [Online]. Available: http://whozthat0.tripod.com/style.htm [2014, May 19].
Rose96. 2011. StudyMode. Boy Roald Dahl [Online]. Available: http://www.studymode.com/essays/Boy-Roald-Dahl-671047.html [2014, May 19].
Walliams, D. 2009. THE INDIPENDANT. David Walliams: Roald Dahl and me [Online]. Available: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/david-walliams-roald-dahl-and-me-1814135.html [2014, May 19].

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