Nearly everything you will read below falls into a single category… being willing to go too far to be funny. We will detail this below and then comment more in the next section.
We often just mention concerning and potentially concerning terms that are used all together in a list for awareness, but there are a couple that we need to make special note of, and they both relate to a joke the author keeps running through nearly the entire storyline. Very early in the book we read from Wyatt (the main character) that “Matt is my best friend. But he can be an idiot”. He really likes this friend, but readers will see a recurring reminder of Matt being an “idiot” (same word keeps getting used over and over). Similarly, there is a young man that constantly passes gas, so we read the word “fart” quite often. Other words that appear: suck, shut up, nerd, moron, Ohmigod, Oh my God, annoying, puke, poop, zombies, vampire, losers, stupid, luck, being lucky. There are also references to SpongeBob, Jurassic Park, Justin Bieber, Kardashians and Homer Simpson.
A more concerning repeated theme is disrespect towards the teacher leading the class trip that the plot revolves around. Quite often throughout the story Wyatt summarizes what this teacher is saying with “Blah, Blah, Blah”. This teacher comes and tells a group of boys to turn off the tv and lights and go to bed, to which they just turn down the TV and stay up. He lies to this teacher and then makes it worse by saying “not a bad lie to come up with on short notice”.
Wyatt has a crush on one of the more popular girls in school. He is constantly scheming to interact with her to gain her attention, even though he knows she has a boyfriend. At one point he comments about this boyfriend, “Sometimes I want to kill him, except he could definitely beat me up”. We hear about this girl being one of the “hot girls” multiple times.
A few other comments to be aware of. When embarrassed Wyatt remarks that he, “really did wish I could jump out of the emergency exit”. He refers to an older woman as “eighty-jillion-year-old”. He says a woman is “pretty, for a teacher”. He jokes, “like if they caught us, they would not only kill us, but eat us”. Wyatt says that “there’s no entertainment like the entertainment of watching somebody else get in trouble”. Wyatt points out a lady “did in fact have a major butt”.
The school tour does a “historic ghost walk”. Wyatt says no one is scared because, “people my age grow up playing games where we fight these really gory battles against realistic monsters that squirt green blood when you decapitate them and we watch movies where people’s eyeballs explode… or they’re captured by a lunatic with a basement dungeon laboratory” (this ends in a joke and is meant to be lighthearted, but the idea that this is normal content for kids today is obviously not a good message to give Christian children). In a similar type of “meant to be funny” comment we read, “You know how in like every horror movie, there’s a scene where the people who are about to get hacked apart by a chainsaw maniac…”