The following is the opening satirical monologue from “The Andrew Klavan Show.“
The bestselling children’s books by the late, great British novelist Roald Dahl are being rewritten by a concerned group of crap-faced cultural locusts with no sense of humor so they will no longer be offensive to crap-faced cultural locusts with no sense of humor. The president of Puffin publishers, Crappy McLocust, says beloved creative works like “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory” and “James and the Giant Peach,” will be rewritten by people who have never created anything beloved by anyone in order to bring them in line with the standards of people who are uncreative and unlovable.
For instance, an amusing passage from “James and the Giant Peach” that describes Aunt Sponge as “fat and pulpy as a jellyfish,” with “a white, flabby face that looked as if it had been boiled,” will have every trace of humor and originality edited out of it so it won’t distract some fatso when he’s busy stuffing his flabby face by giving him a sense of self-awareness and shame or at least a quick laugh before he has a heart attack from stuffing his fat flabby face. The words “mothers and fathers” are being edited out of the book “Matilda” and replaced with the word “parents,” lest children discover how babies are made which would offend the president of Puffin Books, by suggesting his mother was a liar when she told him about the stork.
Now I know what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking: “Oh Klavan, you steaming hot hunk of hilarity, I have to protest that your depiction of Puffin publishing as a squirming den of crap-faced cultural locusts without a sense of humor run by a humorless man named Crappy McLocust is simply too absurd to be believable even though it does make me laugh hysterically while experiencing a deep sense of yearning for the masterful touch of your powerful yet gentle hands.”
And okay, the guy’s name isn’t really Crappy McLocust — perhaps because he suffered a disfiguring naming accident at birth. But as for the rest, I’m not making any of this up. Even the edits, amazingly enough, are real.
Puffin Publishers worked on the betrayal of their sacred trust to a dead author who has been listed among the greatest of British writers since 1945, in tandem with an organization called Inclusive Minds, which describes itself, as [quote – and this is a real quote] “a collaboration of consultants and campaigners with a passion for inclusion, diversity, equality and accessibility in children’s literature, who have no talent or accomplishments of our own and so destroy the work of people who do have talent and accomplishments so we won’t feel so bad about being the pinched, empty, miserable and small-minded no-talents that we are.” Maybe the whole quote isn’t real. I’m not sure.
Anyway, the director of Inclusive Minds, Mullah Omar, joined the organization after leaving his former job as leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan where he oversaw the redesign of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Omar had the 15-hundred-year-old monumental statues dynamited into rubble because they didn’t meet his exacting cultural standards of inclusion and were insensitive to the feelings of black-hearted, fanatical destroyers of great works of art like himself and the other people at Inclusive Minds. While Omar said he didn’t feel comfortable actually dynamiting Roald Dahl’s books, he felt that editing them to bring them in line with contemporary sensibilities would help produce a future generation that would willingly dynamite them at a later date.
Mr. Omar said he hoped to continue collaborating with Puffin and with their parent company Penguin Books, who publish a vast line of immortal classics Mr. Omar says he can’t wait to get his hands on. He hopes in the future that he can combine his organization with Penguin in a single company called Penguin-Taliban or Taliban-Penguin or eventually just Taliban once he edits out all the offensive words from their classic collection, including the word Penguin, which he finds offensive because it’s not the word Taliban. In fact, Mr. Omar says as head of Inclusive Minds, he eventually hopes to redesign all of Western culture in the same way he redesigned the Buddhas of Bamiyan, so that no one will be offended anywhere in western civilization, which will also be redesigned.
To be fair, I should add that Puffin President Crappy McLocust and Inclusive Mind Director Mullah Omar could not have proceeded to desecrate Roald Dahl’s work without permission from Roald Dahl’s copyright holder, Fatso Flabbyface.
Late breaking: Penguin has been so shamed by what Puffin is doing they will now publish classic editions of Roald Dahl’s books to go along with the desecrated editions. So now you can choose whether to buy the classic and burn the new ones, or buy the classic ones and just ignore the new ones.
In either case, they should still be ashamed and they should not publish the edited editions.
Andrew Klavan is the host of The Andrew Klavan Show at The Daily Wire. A popular political satirist and Hollywood screenwriter, Klavan is also an award-winning novelist. His newest novel is A Strange Habit of Mind, book two in the Cameron Winter Mystery series.
The views expressed in this satirical article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
This article has been updated for clarity.