The characters are typical exaggerations of known "types" in a community, and they depict a zany but ultimately affectionate family and community. The first two seasons were the best (do you remember the wonderful episode about the baby bottle of chocolate milk and the guys' televised football game?), but that's often the case with series TV.

Captain Underpants is not my cup of tea, but then I'm middle-aged and have already gotten over the bathroom humor stage. Now I like sex comedies, which are also not uplifting, at least not in a spiritual or intellectual way. They, too, are a waste of time if one regards life as something to work at continually, but I like to kick back a little. Children are the same way. It's hard work to be thinking all the time. Sometimes they like to be silly.

Infrequently perceived item: Children who read silly stuff will go on to read other things. They find reading to be pleasurable, because they have had enough practice to make them skillful at it while reading something that made them laugh. Were you and your friends reading the Time-Life books at the same time that you were reading Dr. Seuss? Somehow I doubt it.

Another infrequently perceived item: Parents of children who are reading -- and there are exceptions to this -- have taken active steps to encourage the children to find reading fun. They have encouraged the children by taking them to the library and the bookstore, and buying books out of those book club fliers that come home from school. They read to the children and read in front of the children. Some, but not all, have encouraged the children to develop their own tastes. They will help the children use books, magazines and newspapers to learn about things that interest them.

If a person wants to judge the value of a book whose theme he finds distasteful -- not immoral or corrupting, mind you, just vulgar -- he must take a look at the vocabulary and the grammatical quality of the writing. Also style. Are the characters distinct and interesting? Does the story have a plot, and does the plot move along in a logical manner? These books are training for more complicated books to be read later. We flavor children's medicines these days so they won't be so hard to take. Why should those things that are good for mechanical brain development, like reading, have to be hard to take, serious and "valuable" all the time?

Recreational fiction is for recreation. It's supposed to be relaxing. In the case of books with a comic theme, they can even be theraputic. Laughter is very good for people's health.

Kids that age indulge in potty humor very often anyway, so why not use it to develop a useful skill? We're talking 7- to 10-year-olds here. Why do they laugh? Because they recognize the inappropriateness of the behavior. (This should be good news.) Are we afraid that the kids, when they grow up, will lose a key client for their firm because they talked about Captain Underpants, or is the danger in them not knowing how to read a contract?

I suppose the saddest thing of all about the story you linked to is that parents who have gotten blue in the nose have decided to challenge the "potty humor" books they find in the school library, and have sometimes succeeded in having them removed. School libraries have plenty of non-fiction to support the curriculum, and the "serious", curriculum-based fiction is usually available in classroom collections, a volume for each student. School libraries have other fiction in them for recreational reading. That fiction is there to foster enjoyment in a pasttime that takes some effort to develop. It's too bad that those parents, in their urge to make the world safe from fart jokes, have decided they have the right to decide what's right for everyone else's children, too.

You want lazy? I'll show you lazy. Lazy is a parent who wants to ban material he or she doesn't like for everyone so as not to have to ask a child every week, "So what did you get at the library? Show me."