Little Miss Sunshine: A Biting Satirical Critique of the Dismissal of Mental Illness and its Sufferers

It's been a long time since my last blog post (February 2020!). Fortunately, absolutely nothing has occurred since then that would require my comment.

What has stirred me to action once more is another children's book. My son is now three, and still requires an awful lot of reading to. Amongst the many books on his bookshelf are several Mr Men books, including Little Miss Sunshine. I do not especially care for this book as it appears on the surface (although it must be admitted that it has aged considerably better than Mr. Tickle). However, a deeper and fuller literary analysis, such as that to which I exposed The Elephant and the Bad Baby reveals a considerable subtext and reveals the full strength of Roger Hargreaves' satirical skill.

Little Miss Sunshine: A Biting Satirical Critique of the Dismissal of Mental Illness and its Sufferers

Little Miss Sunshine (Hargreaves, 1981) is an excellent book, replete with a dry, ironic humour that is very easy to miss. Typical of Hargreaves' subtle, sarcastic wit, on the surface it's the straightforward tale of how Little Miss Sunshine helps to cheer up the King of Miseryland. Indeed, some people even seem to take this story at face value. However, in this essay, I will demonstrate that it is in fact a detailed and compassionate study of the way mental illness is dismissed and disregarded, and a cutting critique of the way sufferers are patronised and ignored.

 

ATTENTION, IF YOU HAVE NOT READ LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS BELOW

 

To summarise the plot, we are first introduced to Miseryland, where everyone is miserable all the time. Even the birds and earthworms are miserable. The king of Miseryland is worst of all, sitting on his throne all day long and crying his eyes out.

 

Little Miss Sunshine sees a road sign for Miseryland, and on a whim decides to visit, passing a sign which warns that smiling, laughing, giggling and all other displays of happiness are forbidden by royal decree. She drives on and arrives at the royal castle where she carelessly smiles at a guard and is promptly arrested.

 

She is marched through the castle to the throne room, where she is denounced to the king, who is now even more miserable than before. Little Miss Sunshine asks if he would like to be happy. He replies that he would, but he can’t, because they’re in Miseryland. Little Miss Sunshine drives him back out to the sign, and uses a marker pen to re-write it, making happiness legal and renaming the country Laughter Land. The king (and presumably everyone else) can now be happy, and Little Miss Sunshine goes home.

 

That’s the plot as it is presented, but I believe that Hargreaves’ true intention with this piece was otherwise than might first appear. I would suggest that the true focus of this work, indeed the true protagonist is not, as first appears, Little Miss Sunshine, but the king.

 

When we are first introduced to him, we are told that he sits on his throne all day long, crying. Now one might think that the most important piece of information here is that he is crying. I would contend that the most important thing is that he is on his throne. This is clearly a man struggling with the most severe clinical depression, and yet every single day, he gets out of bed, he gets dressed, he goes out and HE DOES HIS JOB. He might be sitting there with the tears streaming down his face, but he IS sitting there. Anyone who has themselves struggled with depression, or who knows someone who has, will know what a heroic effort this can sometimes be.

 

Then Little Miss Sunshine arrives. She enters Miseryland, and is immediately informed of the laws and customs of the country she has come to. She heads for the seat of government, and in a staggering display of cultural insensitivity immediately breeches these laws, to the shock and upset of the member of the local law enforcement who has come to welcome her. She is rightly arrested, and taken straight to the king to receive justice (displaying the efficiency of the Miserian legal system).

 

She is presented to the king, and her list of crimes recited, to the king’s significant distress. Rather than take the time to try and learn the history of the country, and discover why Miseryland is so miserable, so that she can actually try and help, Little Miss Sunshine pours scorn on the country’s long-held customs. Then she says something that will surely stick in the craw of anyone who has ever suffered from depression. ‘Well, have you just tried being happy?’

 

Of course! Why hadn’t the king thought of that? Why didn’t he just stop being depressed? Genius. Little Miss Sunshine is presented as one of those obnoxious people who thinks that the best way to cure someone of depression is to be gratuitously, pointedly happy at them. I do not know whether Roger Hargreaves ever suffered from depression himself and received this ‘helpful’ advice, but this section is certainly pointed, his ironic wit skewering the grinning would-be helper with rapier precision.

 

Overbearing the king’s objections, Little Miss Sunshine marches him back through his own castle, bundles him into her car and drives back to the sign. Here, without so much as a ‘by your leave’, she vandalises it, rewriting the time-honoured traditions of Miseryland, and even renaming the country entirely. The paternalistic and colonialist overtones of this are clear, Hargreaves imbuing Little Miss Sunshine with an impenetrable certainty that her ways of doing things are inherently and manifestly better than those of the country she has stumbled in to, without even pausing to ask why things might be the way they are in the first place.

 

Rather than have her executed on the spot, the king capitulates (or at least pretends to). He forces a smile, a laugh even, presenting an outwardly happy exterior despite the fact that nothing has been done to actually treat the crippling depression that must surely still be consuming him from within. This at least has the intended effect of making Little Miss Sunshine leave, convinced that she has helped. When she gets home, she brags to Mr Happy that she has wiped Miseryland from the map, having committed cultural genocide and ridden roughshod over the true feelings of the inhabitants without having to put in the effort of actually helping at all.

 

Roger Hargreaves’ dry, sarcastic, needle-sharp critique of the way mental illness is so often dismissed, and its sufferers patronised and infantilised, is just as relevant now as when it was first published. It is a rebuke to those who would dismiss mental illness as (pardon the expression) a figment of the mind, and reading it, and understanding the message concealed within makes me very happy indeed.

The Convenience, Utility and Justice of Homogenous Groups, Regardless of Size

I would ask you, gentle reader, to compare the two lists below:

List A	List B
Charles Darwin	Caligula
William Shakespeare	Elizabeth Bathory
Charles Dickens	Robespierre
Saint Peter	Adolf Hitler
Obi Wan Kenobi (Episode II onwards)	Joseph Stalin
Me	Nero
Francis of Assisi	Pol Pot
Socrates	Emperor Palpatine
William Booth	Napoleon Bonaparte
Charlemagne	Myra Hindley

The conclusions that we can draw from the scientific and wholly representative study above should be so obvious as to be hardly worth expanding on, and I imagine that you will all be taking action accordingly.  However, that would make for a very short blog post, so I’m afraid that I must insult your intelligence and act as though the above were not self-evident. 

Obviously List A consists of paragons of humanity and over-achievers in their respective fields, be that writing, discovering evolution, philosophy, feeding the poor, fighting the Sith, blogging about writing and/or theology, forming the Holy Roman Empire etc. etc.

List B consists of murderers, dictators and Sith lords; all, it must be admitted, over-achievers in their fields, but one might wish that they’d tried less hard and been distracted more easily.

The common factor is, I hope, instantaneously obvious: beards.  The occupants of List A are all bearded, while the denizens of List B are all unbearded.  At most they might have a moustache.

Now, as we all know, correlation does not necessarily equal causation.  No reasonable person would actually suggest (despite the overwhelming weight of evidence in support of the hypothesis) that beards make one good, wise, witty, and modest.  Nonetheless, it does allow one to make some generalisations that can be assumed to hold true.  If you don’t have a beard, you’re probably a murderer.  You may well have attempted, at some point in the past, to conquer Europe.  You’ve most likely tried, probably unsuccessfully, to shoot lightning from your hands and/or crush the rebel alliance.  You’ve almost certainly had numerous people executed.  Unbearded people are generally and as a rule of thumb, evil.

If you, dear reader, are yourself unbearded, please do not take offence.  Of course the above is not true of all your kind; there are, or at least there must be, somewhere, unbearded people who are good, upright individuals, even if they cannot aspire to the heights of achievement catalogued by the inhabitants of List A.  You may even be one of them, or at least it is not totally beyond the realms of possibility.  I myself don’t have anything against unbearded people; many of my best friends don’t have beards, indeed I am married to an unbearded person.

I imagine that if one were to google ‘Unbearded People’, there would be a wide variety of websites, sound-bites and memes pointing out and mocking the many shortcomings of the breed.  This is unkind, but hardly unexpected.

In the same way that one can talk about bearded people, generalisations may be made about other groups.  Religious people for example.  Although there may be a little variety within the group, nonetheless what holds true for a Taliban suicide bomber can be assumed to also apply to the denizens of your local parish church.  What can be fairly said of a Young Earth creationist can equally be said of an Oxford theology professor.  More so, what can be said of a sixteenth century inquisitor can be said of the staff of the nearest Salvation Army soup kitchen or your local food bank.  Across time and space, ‘religious people’ are as homogenous and unchanging as ‘unbearded people’ (if the latter can really be called ‘people’ at all).  By and large, they (religious people that is, not unbearded people) are ignorant, anti-intellectual and potentially violent, extremely close-minded and hostile (often violently so) to change or any suggestion that their beliefs might not be accurate.

It is extremely useful to us that such generalisations hold true.  We live in a world of convenient clumps, clearly divided into distinct colours and types.  A world of nuance and change would be far too complicated for the human mind to encompass.  I mean, yes public discourse suffers somewhat, and the divisions between groups remain the same, if not growing ever wider, like continental plates slowly and inexorably drifting apart, but what can we do but shrug and wait for our continent to take us somewhere sunny?  Not only that, but the fact that all groups are monolithic and homogenous also allows far greater accountability than would otherwise be possible, a factor which we can all agree if of the utmost benefit to the world. 

After all, since unbearded people can be classed as a distinct and cohesive whole, the actions of any one unbearded person can be fairly laid at the door of any other unbearded person.  You, humble and bare-chinned reader, no matter how innocent you may assume yourself to be, bear the weight of Napoleon’s conquests, the blood of Elizabeth Bathory’s hot-tub stains your skin, the stench of Caligula’s orgies clings to your clothes.  We more fortunate people can ask you to get your house in order and discipline your more fractious elements, and we are able to justify our mistreatment of you because, after all, many innocent bearded people suffered the depredations of Napoleon’s armies, many were oppressed by Nero’s persecutions, a great many killed during Robespierre’s reign of terror.  It is only fair, right and just that you accept responsibility for the sins of your co-barefacers and at least offer a grovelling apology, even if you can’t necessarily offer physical reparations of any kind.

I hope that you now understand, tragic and whiskerless reader, why it is that you receive so much unkindness and abuse, and accept that although it is by no means your fault per se, it is nonetheless just, fair and reasonable, and that you should accept it graciously, humbly, maybe even gratefully.  Ultimately, you have no-one but yourself and those millions of other unbearded people throughout time and space, almost entirely identical to you in all essentials, to blame.

Political Satire

I don't tend to comment on current events.  Except for Queen's sales figures.  But apart from that, I tend to remain stoic and silent on the subject.

However, with everything kicking off over in the Ukraine, many people seem to be under a false impression of the cause of this situation.  The reality is rather more saddening than the common supposition, and thus it falls to me to illuminate you, via the medium of rhyming(ish) verse:

That poor Mr Putin is misunderstood.

He’s kindly and noble, distinguished and good.

This deadly debacle must be denounced,

For it is all down to how words are pronounced.

You see he was talking one day to a chap,

Who brought out a detailed and colourful map.

He showed him a region almost next door,

Unknowingly starting the crisis and war.

For Putin’s a tireless enforcer of law,

To sinners and hoodlums, he gives them what for!

Against all wrongdoing his quest is unending,

He’s fearless and bold, untiring, unbending.

For Mr Putin it’s quite an obsession,

To catch malefactors and teach them a lesson.

As soon as he finds the tiniest trace,

Of criminal dealings he’s right on the case!

Expecting no praise, no payment or thanks,

He readies the army, he sends in the tanks.

He hails them with rockets; he pelts them with shot, 
He hits the wrongdoers with all that he’s got.

And so the whole world’s come sadly a cropper,

Because Putin’s aide, he doesn’t talk proper.

And thus this bloke’s accent caused violence and fear,

For he showed him the map and said “Look, there’s crime ‘ere.”

Copyright Thomas Jones 2014