The Laughter Button [with Shirly Someck]

All children like to laugh, and we all enjoy seeing our children smiling and laughing. But what do we answer if anyone asks us, as little Shirly asked Ronny, how and why and when do we laugh? Here is a charming, original and simple idea.

The body has all kinds of machines in it: the breathing machine, the heart machine, the digesting machine, and the machine for moving arms and legs. Deep, deep inside the body there is also a laughter machine, which works, like all machines, when a button is pressed. Sometimes the button gets pressed all by itself, for instance, when Shirly put her tiny feet into Mommy’s shoes and almost managed to walk to the door in them. Sometimes we simply feel like laughing for no special reason, and then we have to press the button by ourselves. But where is it? We search and search for it,- until we reach the underarm. That is where the laughter button hides, and when it’s pressed all the sadness goes out the window, we forget the quarrel with our best friend, forget the boy who snatched the swing from us, and that sore scratch on the elbow.

But what should we do when the button doesn’t work? “Maybe the battery’s finished and it’s time to replace it,” says Mommy. “It can’t be!” says clever Shirly, who already knows the difference between ordinary machines and the laughter machine, but the word “battery” sounds so funny that just saying it presses the laughter button, and the machine starts to work again. The story is entirely handpainted, including the text, creating a delightful composition of illustrations and text.