The Troubling History of Mr. Tickle

Sometimes, you just don't want to know

I recently asked my wife what kinds of things she collected as a child. After a bit of thought she told me she had a sticker book. When I asked her what kinds of stickers she collected as first she said “all kinds.” Then her memories kicked in. “I had a lot of Scratch and Sniff stickers,” said said. And then she told me about a sticker of “some weird happy face guy with super long arms.”

I was completely baffled. “You had a sticker of Slender Man?”

“No,” she replied. “He was happy. And I think he was from Arby’s.”

Huh.

The internet is sometimes a beautiful place and in just a few minutes I was able to discover this wiggly-armed memory of my wife’s: the one and only Mr. Tickle.

Mr. Tickle is one of the many characters from Roger Hargreaves’ series of books for children, Mr. Men and Little Miss. Each book in the series focuses on one of more than 90 characters that make up this world. There’s Mr. Forgetful, Little Miss Sunshine, Mr. Greedy and Little Miss Bossy. In each book, the title character has an adventure and learns a lesson, teaching something to kids along the way.

All of the characters except for one: Mr. Tickle.

There’s a part of me that wished I had stopped my research at this point and if you want to go to bed tonight thinking Mr. Tickle was a good guy, now’s a good time to stop reading.

(That’s what I was afraid of.)

Things change over time and sometimes, even when those changes are for good, it can be difficult to retrain our way of thinking. My dad will never wear a seatbelt and I will never wear a bicycle helmet.

Mr. Tickle was the very first book in the Mr. Men series and it is not remembered as fondly as the others. A lot of people take issue with the book because Mr. Tickle does not learn a lesson or suffer any consequences from his random tickling. Other characters in the series, like Mr. Late and Little Miss Messy, teach lessons to children through their own faults. Mr. Tickle does not do that. He is just a serial tickler.

More troublesome is that the entire concept of tickling people, especially strangers. Tickling is seen differently today than it was when I was young. I think everyone had that one uncle that would tickle you until you were seconds away from wetting your pants no matter how many times we begged them to stop — although admittedly it is difficult to be taken seriously while laughing uncontrollably. Today, tickling — especially that hard, “please stop” type of tickling — is seen differently. Some people have gone as far as to classify it as a “body violation.”

Poor Mr. Tickle. All he wanted to do was make people laugh.

One of the things that confused me the most regarding my wife’s memory was that she had associated Mr. Tickle not with a series of children’s books, but with the fast foot chain Arby’s.

In the early 1980s, Arby’s had a promotion where they gave away Mr. Men figures. The original promotion contained seven different figures, one of which was Mr. Tickle. Arby’s has revisited the line of toys a few times over the years.

Is it possible my wife got the sticker from Arby’s? Maybe, or maybe she just remembers Mr. Tickle from the marketing campaign and mashed the two memories together.

According to legend, Mt. Tickle was invented when the author’s son asked him what a tickle looked like. I’d like to think that tickles look like Mr. Tickle — not a mean-spirited torture session, but a guy with a big smile, long arms, and big hands specifically designed for efficient tickling.

In my mind, Mr. Tickle’s middle name is “Consensual,” which solves a lot of problems.