Middle school is riddled with the
idea of superiority as the only way for survival. If you are popular,
well-liked, or strong you automatically have the upper hand over other middle
school kids. Kids in middle school, like Greg Heffley in Diary of a Whimpy Kid try desperately to achieve superiority as a
way to verify their existence in the midst of puberty and make sure they’re not
the low man on the food chain. This exercise of attempting to achieve
superiority is where the comedy happens in Whimpy
Kid.
It first appears on the first
page of the book where Greg expresses his anxieties about writing in a
journal—not a diary—for fear of being beaten up. Because of this, and because
he is considered a middle school loser, he seeks out ways to stand out or
conform to middle school life that will achieve the accepted status he so
desires. Beginning with the cheese touch, Greg highlights one very obvious way
in which middle schoolers assert their power: simply put, you touch the cheese
you’re a pariah for life. Greg makes this fact very apparent and therefore does
absurd things like walking around with his fingers taped. This odd scene is a
comical one for both an adult and child reader, but why? For children, it is potentially
comical because the superiority theory in this case provided relief: kids have
known or experienced something similar to this in their elementary or middle
school careers. Adults can think this is funny because the have their chance to
feel superior over the narrator: thinking that he is just a stupid kid with
irrational fears. But while Greg
desperately seeks to attain superiority he does not do a great job of achieving
it. He bullies Rowley a lot—i.e. “Did you know your hand is bigger than your
face?” SMACK.—to assert his dominance and also excludes Fregley a lot, deeming
him to be lower than himself. Greg does the very things to Rowley and Fregley
that he does not want to happen to him in order to gain superiority in some
small way. We ultimately see Greg fail in his quest—Rowley eats the cheese and
still ends up becoming more popular than Greg—despite his very best efforts. It
is in the end where we realize, after all the middle-school comedy, that Greg
has failed. Then, the reader—both adult and child alike—asserts their dominance
over Greg, feeling superior in this moment, and is able to laugh at the end and
throughout the book for the exact reason that they are judging Greg for: being
superior.
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