Do You Want to Play With My Balls?
by Cifaldi Brothers
The Cifaldi Brothers wrote a children’s book about a young boy who loves his balls and wants to share them with everyone he meets. It is completely, wholesome, one hundred percent appropriate for children of all ages. The cover, the illustrations, the text — all entirely innocent.
The title, however, is doing an awful lot of work.
Do You Want to Play With My Balls? belongs to a very specific and noble subgenre: children’s books that are technically appropriate for children but were clearly written to be purchased by adults as gag gifts for other adults. The humor is entirely in the reader’s head, which makes it somehow even funnier — the book isn’t trying to be dirty. It’s earnestly, relentlessly wholesome. The double entendres emerge naturally, like wildflowers in a field that happen to spell something regrettable.
Every single page somehow makes it worse, which is to say better. The boy has many kinds of balls. He wants everyone to touch them. He’s proud of how bouncy they are. The adults reading aloud at bedtime are left to manage their own composure with no assistance from the text whatsoever.
As a gift for parents, teachers, or anyone with a sense of humor and an affection for technicalities, this book is genuinely delightful. It’s also the only thing at a baby shower that will cause someone to spit out their punch. That alone is worth the price.