Funny / Wayside School

Sideways Stories From Wayside School

• Louis tells Mrs. Jewls' students a story about children who attended a one-story schoolhouse, never got turned into apples, never ate Maurecia-flavored ice cream, etc. Mrs. Jewls and her students refuse to believe a school with such "strange and silly" children exists.
• The entire introduction, which consists entirely of the narrator attempting desperately to explain how the heck the school ended up the way it did. Especially considering the builder of the school said he was "sorry".
• In the first story, Mrs. Gorf successfully turns every student into apples. Just as she's celebrating that with no students she won't need to force herself up the stairs every day, the apples attack her.
• Joe can't count, so Mrs. Jewls tries to teach him how to count... And yet Joe always arrives to the correct answer anyways ("A thousand, a million, three."), resulting in the funny exchanges such as "There are four there", and he's told "No there's four!" SO many students who've gotten answers right but didn't do what the teachers wanted them to were laughing like mad at this.
• “There is no Miss Zarves. There is no nineteenth story. Sorry.” It's impossible not to laugh at the sheer absurdity, especially the first time you ever read it.
• Mrs. Jewls isn’t told that Miss Zarves, and her entire class, doesn’t exist, so she sends Calvin down there to deliver a note. But she also forgets to give him the note. Calvin isn’t sure what to do, until Louis tells him “You are not supposed to take no notes to no teachers. You already haven’t done it.” Turns out the “very important note” was to cancel a meeting between Mrs. Jewls and Miss Zarves, a meeting that never could have taken place.

Wayside School is Falling Down

• In chapter 12 of Falling Down, Jason's pencil chewing habit gets so bad he has to borrow pencils from other students and chews them too. Mrs. Jewls' solution? Taping Jason's mouth shut. This becomes even funnier because when Allison laughs at him, Jason's speech impairment allows him to curse at her with impunity. Oh, and because of his big mouth, Jason has a lot of tape on his head.
  • And at the end, Mrs. Jewels notes that Jason was a lot quieter than normal, and considers doing the same for the rest of the students.
• "Star bringing purple! Star bringing yorbel! STOP BRINGING YORBEL! STOP RINGING YOUR BELL!" The trapdoor of the school is then opened...and a bunch of cows are in the building due to Mrs. Jewels ringing a cowbell and the sound was carried over great distances.
• After he forgets to bring his own lunch, Ron reluctantly orders Miss Mush's mushroom surprise for lunch. When he takes a bite, Deedee asks him what the surprise is. He just looks at her, his face flushes, his eyes change color, and then he kisses her right on the lips. He has no recollection of it. Minutes later, Mrs. Jewls, who had heard about him ordering the mushroom surprise, asks him what the surprise is. He just looks at her, his face flushes, and his eyes change color... Several chapters later, we learn that Mrs. Jewls made Miss Mush throw away the rest of the mushroom surprise, and made her promise to never make it again.
• Mr. Kidswatter's interrogation of the three Erics trying to find out which of is responsible for writing an insulting message calling him a "mugworm gilbrick" and also learn what the made-up insult means. The actual culprit even suggests Mr. Kidswatter look it up in the dictionary, but he mutters he already tried that.
• In "Bebe's Baby Brother", Bebe gets in trouble with Mrs. Jewls when she finds rude comments written on her homework, but she avoids trouble by blaming it on her younger brother Ray. When pressed for details, Bebe happily tells Mrs. Jewls all about Ray's other mischievous deeds—including filling her socks with toothpaste, and chucking all of her underwear out the window. It turns out that Ray doesn't exist.^note Or as we learn in a later story: he does exist. He's in Miss Zarves' class on the 19th floor.

Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger

• The confusion that "Pet Day" causes for readers who don't read the list of students and pets at the end.
  • And the later blink-and-you'll-miss-it Call-Back in the voice switching incident.
  Todd barked.
• The introduction of elevators into the school. The principal decided that there should be two elevators: one that goes up, and one that goes down, and in order to prevent kids from playing around with them they should only be able to go in those directions. The result: the elevators are used only once, and then never again.
  • The reason the principal felt the need to set things up so strictly — he had made a rule to stop kids running into each other on the stairs but it kept happening anyway. The rule? Go up on the right side and go down on the left. Think about it for a moment ...
• When all the students were sent to different schools, Todd was sent to the worst school of all, but the narrator doesn't need to tell you what it was like — Todd was sent to your school.
• When the kids write poems about their favorite colors, we get a few funny moments where some of the students have problems coming up with rhymes for their chosen colors — but the prize has to go to Dana, who can't think of anything that rhymes with "pink" despite listing several words without knowing it: "I can't think. My mind's on the blink. I'm no good at poetry, I stink!" Then she complains that her pen is out of ink, and John makes fun of her and won't let her borrow his. So what does her poem end up being?
  My favorite color is pink.
  John is a ratfink!

Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom

• Mrs. Jewls asks the kids how much a million is. Mac raises his hand, and says "a million!" Mrs. Jewls says he's right, but she needs a better answer than that, so she calls on John. John says nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine plus one. The other students think he is very smart.
• Some of the words the kids suggest for a spelling lesson.
  Joy raised her hand. "A," she suggested.
  "A what?" asked Mrs. Jewls.
  "Just a," said Joy.
  "Don't you think that's a little too easy?" said Mrs. Jewls.
  "It's a very common word," said Kathy. "It's important that we all know how to spell it."
• When Mr. Kidswatter learns Louis writes books about their school, he suspiciously asks if he's in them and Louis nervously tries to downplay this and change the subject rather than discuss how he portrays Mr. Kidswatter.
• Mr. Kidswatter asks what the plastic containers at the front of the room are for. Paul explains that they're collecting toenails. Leslie corrects him, saying that they're also collecting fingernails so he doesn't think their class is weird.
• Louis explains to Stephen that Mr. Kidswatter is the smartest principal in the school, and must have had a good reason for picking him to ring the gong. Flashback to the day he was chosen, revealing Mr. Kidswatter meant to pick Joy, who had referred to him as "the best principal ever!!!" but spotted Dana, who had gotten him stuck with a terrible face earlier in the book. He prepares to point at her accusingly, but she bends down to scratch a mosquito bite. Stephen sits behind Dana.
  • In the chapter this scene is flashing back to, Kidswatter can be seen briefly confused when he realizes he picked Stephen, but he rolls with it because he won't admit to making a mistake.

Sideways Arithmetic Series

• Todd gives the correct answer to the problem, "ears+ears=swear", but then gets sent home early for swearing in the classroom.
• Sue gets annoyed enough by sideways arithmetic that she tries to get Mrs. Jewls to add numbers together, such as 1 + 1 = 2. Mrs. Jewls proceeds to write the words one and two into the equation. When Sue screams that she's supposed to write the numbers, Mrs. Jewls says there aren't any 1s or 2s in the problem, which is true given the parameters of the problem as presented.
• Eric Bacon tries to wing a geography quiz by answering every question with "Alaska" and manages to get "at least one" correct as a result.^note To boot, it's a question that everyone else got wrong.
• One of the questions on a test about animals is "What animal is fat and gray like a rhinoceros, and its name almost even sounds like rhinoceros, and it is even harder to spell than rhinoceros, but it isn't a rhinoceros?" It's a hippopotamus.
• The questions for the holiday test all include part of the answer in them. Despite this, "due to the difficulty of these questions", only two students get any given question correct.
• Miss Mush got the job of Wayside School lunch teacher because she's so tall and gangly that she's the only person capable of reaching the top shelf of a cabinet above the refrigerator.
• The reason why why Miss Mush's cooking has a terrible reputation despite her food being okay on the few occasions someone's shown eating it is revealed: there's an inverse relationship between the number of meals Miss Mush cooks and how good it tastes.
• Mrs. Jewls gives three of her students additional true or false tests for issues they're having: Myron is put out by half the statements being false, Stephen doesn't know which word rhymes with "blue", and Joy calls both of them stupid because she got full points, which prompts Mrs. Jewls to tell her she can't leave until she gets full points on her test. Myron's test is ambiguous enough that the answers can be both true or false, Stephen's test questions can either be true or false but not both at the same time, and Joy's is flat-out impossible.
  Joy: If one is true, then two is true. But if two is true, then one is false. But if one is false, then two is false. But if two is false, then one is true. But if one is true then two is — Aaaaaaaaaa!
• Allison invites Stephen and Jason to her birthday party, but explains that if more than two boys come, they'll all act "real silly". Mrs. Jewls uses "simple arithmetic" to back her up, writing "boys+boys=silly" on the board. Then, for the sake of gender equality, she also writes, "girls+girls=silly".
• Mrs. Jewls makes multiple attempts at trying to remember her computer's password, but each guess only delivers the message, "That is not the password." Eventually, she becomes so desperate, she also types, "That is not the password." That doesn't work, either.