Funny bedtime stories

Bedtime comedy is a narrower category than daytime comedy. Anything that ends with a chase leaves a child bouncing; anything too clever goes over a four-year-old's head. These eleven stories split into two useful sorts.

Quick and dry

The Emperor’s New Clothes is three minutes, the shortest story on this page, and the joke is entirely in the last line. It is an Andersen adaptation for ages 4–8 and the only story here actually marked funny. The Bald Man and the Fly gives five gentle minutes of one man losing an argument with an insect. The Snow Man is four minutes and funny in a wistful way rather than a loud one.

Loud and long

The Chronicle of the Pancake runs eight minutes of escalating chase and is the noisiest thing here. The Gingerbread Man is its six-minute cousin, a classic folk tale retelling with a chorus your child will shout along with. The Three Robbers is eight minutes of bungled crime. These are Saturday stories, not Tuesday ones.

Funny first, quiet last

Laughing is not the enemy of sleep, but ending on a laugh often is. The order that works is funny first, quiet last. Read The Gingerbread Man, let the chanting happen, then bring the room down with something short and gentle from gentle sleepy stories.

When there is only time for one

If you only have time for one story and your child needs cheering up, pick from the dry end: The Clown and the Countryman is six minutes and is literally about how laughter warms a room, and it does not raise the temperature the way a chase does. Our guide to character voices is more useful on this page than on any other: most of the comedy here lives in delivery.

Three of the eleven are retellings of tales you will already know. Puss in Boots is a six-minute Charles Perrault retelling in which the cat is funnier than anyone realises; A Midsummer Night’s Dream compresses Shakespeare into four minutes of mistaken love; and The Emperor’s New Clothes comes from Andersen. The rest were written for this site.

The gentlest of all eleven is Together We Are Good: The Day the Little Helpers Saved the Town, seven minutes for ages 3–7, which is cheerful rather than hilarious and makes a safe last story. The wildest is The Gingerbread Knight’s Sweet Victory in Space, seven minutes of biscuit heroics in orbit.

One note on ages. A joke that depends on someone being ridiculous, as in The Emperor’s New Clothes, needs a child of about four to work. Before that, comedy has to be physical or repeated, which is what the chase stories give you.

For more in this register, nursery rhymes has the rhythmic silliness for younger children, and animal stories holds most of the talking creatures.