Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #151: The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

I began this column with movies in mind but when patrons proposed that I write about television shows, whether in the form of individual episodes or Batman Beyond in its entirety I happily acquiesced because, to be brutally honest, I DESPERATELY NEED THE MONEY. 

On a similar note, when patrons proposed that I cover books for this column in the form of Neil Patrick Harris’ choose-your-own-adventure memoir and a children’s book entitled The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith I happily agreed. 

In a neat coincidence, I’d actually read The Stinky Cheese Man to my son a few weeks before I had the opportunity to write about it for this column. I love to read books to my six year old son Declan every night. It’s my favorite time of the day. 

One of the nice things about sharing a deep love and appreciation for “Weird Al” Yankovic with your child is that it makes concepts like parody and pastiche a lot easier to explain and understand. 

The Stinky Cheese Man is a riotous exercise in parody. Yet it’s also intensely meta, a rollicking exercise in kid-friendly post-modernism that never lets readers forget that they’re reading a fictional story by some dude riffing on a fuck-ton of other, more famous fictional stories also written by dudes somewhere way back in history. 

So cute! So stinky!

Here’s the thing: kids fucking love post-modernism. They dig it! They can’t get enough. There’s something about it that appeals specifically to their sensibilities. I know as a child three of my favorite things to watch on television were Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck Looney Tunes cartoons, the 1960s live-action Batman and The Monkees. 

All three are dazzlingly meta productions that introduce small children to the concept of post-modernism as perfectly as Al’s oeuvre does parody. 

That’s why kids dig stuff like Shrek or The Lego Movie: they continually break the fourth wall in ways children can appreciate in part because they spoof characters, stories and worlds that kids are all familiar with: unless they’re cruelly deprived of entertainment, kids are going to know superheroes and fairy tale characters and fairy tales. 

That means that the under-5 set is going to be familiar with pretty much all of the characters in The Stinky Cheese Man, even with parodic names and identities. The titular Stinky Cheese Man, for example, is a malodorous take on The Gingerbread Man while Chicken Likken is Chicken Little by another, stupider name. 

The theatrical adaptation of The Stinky Cheese Man looks like pure nightmare fuel.

The meta gags begin before the book does, with THE Little Red Hen (of storybook fame) braying about needing someone to help her plant wheat in order to make bread. The Little Red Hen’s protestations are answered by Jack (of Beanstalk fame), the book’s narrator, who protests, “I’m Jack. I’m the narrator. And no, I can’t help you plant the wheat. I’m a very busy guy trying to put a book together. Now why don’t you just disappear for a few pages? I’ll call you when I need you.” 

It’s like Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author but for kids, and funny! 

Instead of a dedication we get an inspired parody of dedications. Instead of being dedicated to anyone in particular we’re informed “This book is dedicated to our close, personal, special friend:” and then instructed (your name here) by the authors. 

To further poke fun at the idea of dedications, the dedication is upside down to acknowledge/highlight its insignificance. Jack’s introduction is every bit as self-deprecating and meta. It essentially apologizes for all of the stupidity and random nonsense the reader will be subjected to, including the introduction itself, concluding, “you should definitely go read the stories now, because the rest of this introduction just kind of goes on and on and doesn’t really say anything. I stuck it on to the end here so it wouldn’t fill up the page and make it look like I really knew what I was talking about. So stop now. I mean it. Quit reading. Turn the page. If you read this last sentence, it won’t tell you anything.” 

With all of that preamble out of the way, we then start the book proper with “Chicken Licken”, an absurdist parody of Chicken Little (the children’s story and, to a lesser extent, Zach Braff animated motion picture) that begins with Chicken Licken hysterically insisting that the sky is falling and that he must tell the President so that he can do something about it. 

He’s interrupted by Jack the Narrator, who insists that he forgot to include the Table of Contents, which climactically falls from the sky and squashes everyone. It’s a fiendishly clever way to sort of begin a series of gleefully nonsensical fairy tale spoofs that have a funny way of overlapping and crashing into one another. 

What follows are warped versions of oft-told tales with blasts of curdled nihilism where the morals should be. The Princess and the Pea gets a bowling ball-themed update. The Ugly Duckling, meanwhile, does not grow up to be a beautiful swan but rather “just a really ugly duck.” 

“The Other Frog Prince” starts off the usual way, with a sorrowful prince telling a beautiful princess that he’s actually a handsome prince who was the victim of a terrible curse that transformed him into a frog. But when the princess buys his spiel and plants a big old smooch on his icky frog lips, he concedes, “I was just kidding” and hops away. 

That might seem like a nasty little punchline for a sordid, soggy tale but it made me chuckle out loud. Our perpetually flummoxed narrator Jack next reappears to share the story of “Little Red Running Shorts”, a parody of Little Red Riding Hood where the little girl has little red running shorts that allow her to run so fast she actually makes it to grandma’s house before the big, bad wolf. 

Jack does such a bang-up job of narrating that Little Red Running Shoes and the big, bad wolf feel no need to actually enact their story. A mortified Jack insists he’s allotted three pages for the story in the table of contents, and now he’s left with nothing to fill that third page, which is, appropriately enough, left completely blank. 

Jack, our harried and confused narrator, attempts unsuccessfully to tell his own story, only to be interrupted by the Giant from the very same tale, who insists on telling a story of his own that mashes up fairy tale cliches in a delightfully nonsensical way: “The end of the evil stepmother said “I’ll huff and snuff and give you three wishes.” The beast changed into the seven dwarves happily ever after for a spell had been cast by a Wicked Witch.”

At a certain point The Stinky Cheeseman starts to make readers feel like they’re losing their goddamn minds. That point comes when Jack gets to tell his story, after a fashion, but since the giant has threatened to grind his bones to make bread once he’s finished he decides not to ever finish by repeating the same words over and over and over as they get progressively smaller until they’re so tiny they’re unreadable. 

The self-described “madcap revisions of familiar fairy tales” concludes with the characteristically absurdist eponymous yarn followed by clever Jack tricking the Giant into eating the poor Little Red Hen. 

Just as the sly meta gags begin before the story itself, they extend to the copyright page, which warns “Anyone caught telling these fairly stupid tales will be visited, in person, by the Stinky Cheese Man.” 

There is a lot going on here, as evidenced by the fact that my article about The Stinky Cheese Man is perhaps longer than the book itself, which you can read to your children in its entirety in ten to fifteen minutes. 

The Stinky Cheese Man a delight for children and adults alike. It’s stupid in a very clever way and clever in its stupidity. Best of all, it’s very short so I didn’t have to watch a movie or read a three hundred page book in order to write this article and time management is exceedingly important to me at this stage of my life and career.

In reading and writing about The Stinky Cheese Man I saved time and got to venture into children’s books for the first time, a win-win proposition all around. 

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