Coloring for Grown-Ups: The Adult
Activity Book. By Ryan Hunter & Taige Jensen. Plume. $10.
Coloring for Grown-Ups: Holiday
Fun Book. By Ryan Hunter & Taige Jensen. Plume. $10.
The cleverest thing about
Ryan Hunter and Taige Jensen’s takeoffs on the time-honored coloring book for
children is the title. This is coloring for grown-ups
but not for adults – these books are
for people who have advanced chronologically without attaining any sort of
maturity, self-awareness or worldliness. No worries: these books are there to
provide all of them. Well, except maturity.
Now, it is true that the
word “adult” appears in the subtitle of the first of these books. But it does
not necessarily mean that this is an activity book for adults. It could just as
easily mean it is a book about adult activities – you know, casual sex, overuse
of alcohol, becoming mired in debt, “compromising your integrity and goals”
(part of the heading of one page). Whether Hunter and Jensen are in fact clever
enough to have created that ambiguity of double meaning is left as an exercise
for the reader. Or colorer.
The books are indeed laid
out like coloring books. The pages are in black and white and are perforated
for easy removal of the masterpieces once they are colored – the format really
does duplicate that of kids’ coloring books. But the point here is to subtly
undermine readers’ notions of what “grown-up” really means.
Nah, not subtly. One page in
Coloring for Grown-Ups says to
remember that “you can be anything you want when you get older!” and includes only the suitable-for-coloring examples
of “hospitality staff, mall food court assistant manager, data entry
specialist, career barista, stay-at-home dad” and “insurance beneficiary.” The
funniest entry in the book is a two-page spread called “adulthood from A to Z”
in which big, insincere smiles appear on medication capsules and pills (“A is
for Antidepressants,” “X is for Xanax”), documents (“L is for Loan
Consolidation,” “M is for Mortgages,” “S is for Second Mortgages”), sample
containers (“U is for Urine Samples”), exercise equipment (“T is for
Treadmills”), and so on, all the way to “Z is for Zoning Regulations.” Also
here is a decidedly unattractive page (no matter how you color it) showing an
unpleasant-looking urban neighborhood and giving instructions on “How to Speak
Real Estate” through a matching game in which, for example, “lots of character”
means “site of several homicides.” Even the “solutions” pages are snarky, with
the answer to the word finder titled “Evade Jury Duty!” praising the reader for
“successfully [coming] across as the unstable, bigoted misanthrope you secretly
are.” There are also a few diploma-like certificates, suitable for framing
after they are colored, for such accomplishments as “outstanding achievement in
the passive aggressive arts” and “doing the dishes at least one time.” The
temptation to color all the pages solid black may be difficult to resist.
Coloring for Grown-Ups: Holiday Fun Book is more of the same, with
all-through-the-year seasonal twists. It starts with two clearly hung-over
people in bed and a suggestion to “use your imagination to gracefully escape
the home of the stranger you slept with on New Year’s Eve,” and progresses to
lots of other notable and not-so-notable holidays. “Valentines for Grown-Ups,”
all suitable for coloring, include such messages as “I Tolerate You,” “We’re
Getting Fat,” and “We Have the Same STD So You Might as Well Stay with Me for a
While.” For Mother’s Day there is a “guilt quiz” inviting readers to color
impressions of “forgotten dreams,” “postpartum depression,” “stretch marks” and
more. One of the funnier entries is for President’s Day – eight people to color
under the heading, “Who Will Never Be President?” The eight are identified as
“Latino, Woman, Muslim, Homosexual, Mormon, Atheist, Lizard Person” and “Bald
Guy.” The “solutions” page explains, “This page was a trick question. A lizard
person is always president.” The book even includes some non-holidays: one page
to design a federal holiday of your own and one to “make up your own Jewish
holiday so your boss will let you ditch work,” using syllables such as “rosh,”
“kem,” “sim,” “el,” “chutz,” “schmear” and so on. There are also “lesser-known
holiday mascots” to color, including “Muggsy the lying mug” for Father’s Day
(emblazoned “#1 Dad”) and “Ashy Wendy, the preaching pile of cinders” for Ash
Wednesday. There is plenty of equal-opportunity insulting to go around here,
which may make you wonder if you might want to take seriously the Earth Day
suggestion: a page on which Earth smiles broadly while “imagining the various
ways the human race might wipe itself off the face of the planet.” It would be
exaggerating to describe the Coloring for
Grown-Ups books as good clean fun, but they are reasonably good, semi-clean
sort-of-fun if you happen to be in the target audience. If you are, they will
certainly help pass a little bit of time while you wait for actual adulthood –
read “maturity” – to kick in. Which, hopefully, it will.
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