If kids read The Twits and laugh, hairy-faced men will just have to cope

April 29, 2026 — 3:30pm

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OK, Your Honour, you got me, I confess. I saw that flushbunking snozzwanger with his redunculous beard, and so help me, I thought, “I am all sorts of triggered by this crodsquinkler’s dirty facial hair. He must pay!” So, I tackled that fluckgungler and I scrubbed his catasterous face until it shone like a thousand coruscating frobscottles. You say assault, I say crimes against hygiene. And frankly, Your Honour, I’d do it all again.

But, Your Worship, I beseech you, please go easy on my co-accused, Mr and Mrs Muggle-Wump and the Roly-Poly Bird. Men with filthy beards set them off, too. They’re just acting on orders from their overlord, that late criminal mastermind and erstwhile beloved children’s author, Roald Dahl.

In conclusion, sir, The Twits made me do it. Ever since I read that book at the age of six, I’ve harboured a deep resentment towards men with facial hair, such that the very sight of one causes me to summon my fleet of flying African monkeys to strike a pre-emptive blow on behalf of brainwashed children everywhere.

That’s why it comes as such a phenomenal relief that someone, finally, has seen what a dreadful threat is contained in this how-to guide for the emerging criminal class. Enter Southern Cross University’s Dr Mellie Green and her solar-powered, aspirational, educational ivory tower. Her research paper on “the dilemma of Dahl dominance”, published in The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, decries The Twits for its (deep breath) depictions of domestic violence, animal cruelty, abuse, coercive power, fear framed as humour, anthropocentrism, moral simplification, binary thinking and derogatory stereotyping of men with beards.

(Spoiler: I slogged my way through all 22 pages of Green’s paper, and I did not find it a ripping read. The Twits was better. But then I invented a drinking game where I was allowed to take a swig every time I saw the words “pedagogical” or “palimpsestic” in the text, and so help me, I didn’t mind it so much after that.)

Criticism over Roald Dahl book in classrooms

As a teacher herself, Green would very much like to see The Twits “more critically assessed” by education authorities. The plot’s premise, involving a married couple who set about making one another’s lives miserable before finally getting their comeuppance at the hands of a family of enterprising monkeys and the aforementioned Roly-Poly Bird, fails her sniff test because of its “lack of inclusion, reliance on ridicule, stereotyping [and the] normalisation of cruelty as humour”, as Green thunders.

Quite right, too. We should be pulping copies of The Twits as a matter of some urgency, before all those impressionable young boys, who chortled at Mr Twit’s ham-fisted attempts to convince Mrs Twit that she was shrinking, arm themselves with a saw and go after their non-existent wives’ walking sticks. Young girls, meanwhile, should forthwith be discouraged from cooking worms into their husbands’ bowls of spaghetti, or hiding glass eyes in their spouses’ flagons of beer.

To her credit, Green recognises that she faces an uphill battle in her heroic attempts to save society from the scourge of domestic violence-related incidents involving husbands placing live frogs into their marital beds to scare their gormless wives, as Mr Twit did.

According to Green’s figures, Roald Dahl’s 43 books have sold 250 million copies globally, with The Twits alone responsible for 16 million of those sales. The book, which was published in 1981, has since been translated into 41 languages.

Roald Dahl’s The Twits revels in grotesquerie and offence – exactly as it should

That’s a lot of kids, giggling at a lot of misdeeds. Who cares if they’re riveted to the story at a time when getting them off screens, out of online scream chambers and engaged in reading remains one of the greatest challenges facing educators everywhere?

Mr Twit is mean to animals, damn it! As such, The Twits “undermines opportunities for eco-literacy by reinforcing anthropocentric dominance and trivialising harm to living systems, contradicting curricular aims related to sustainability, ethical understanding and respect for the more-than-human world”. Furthermore, Mr Twit himself should also be viewed as a victim, with his dirty facial hair stereotyping him and all bearded men, as “suspicious, unhygienic and morally suspect”.

All of which brings us to the clean-shaven villain of the piece, Roald Dahl himself. The author, who died some 35 years ago, has (rightly) posthumously been taken to task for antisemitic comments made during his lifetime, and the fact that he was a lousy husband (at least according to his first wife). Even though all that has the square root of nothing to do with the plot of The Twits, a quick character assassination of Dahl belongs in Green’s research paper because she is coming from “a position of increasing discomfort with texts that no longer sit comfortably with contemporary expectations”.

In that spirit then, stand by for the riveting sequel treatise, “Charlie & The Chocolate Factory: Cavities and Cancel Culture”. After all, that impoverished little blighter, Charlie Bucket, gorged himself on Wonka bars and didn’t brush his teeth even once. He probably didn’t wash his hands, either.

What a vermicious little trogglehunter, as Dahl might’ve said. Let’s get rid of Charlie before he’s old enough to get chocolate in his beard.

Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.

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