Double Down

The Diary of a Wimpy Kid stories rely on Greg Heffley remaining fundamentally the same so that in each installment his misadventures stay tonally and structurally consistent. He does not learn lessons or change his behavior to account for new information. Even when, for example, he thinks about past times when he has been punished for lying, it doesn’t prevent him from continuing to lie. The humor of the Wimpy Kid books results from the familiarity of structural and tonal consistency, which would be disrupted if Greg learned his lesson. If Wile E. Coyote catches the Roadrunner or Elmer Fudd gets Bugs Bunny, the joke won’t work. Similarly, much of Greg’s appeal as a protagonist lies in his inability or unwillingness to learn from his mistakes. Greg represents a moment in many people’s pre-adolescence where social survival and self-interest are the most important motivators, rather than intrinsic strengths of character such as Perseverance and Commitment, or Friendship and Loyalty. The series’s engagement with these themes is predicated on a perspective that willfully disregards them.

Double Down finds its humor in exaggerating Greg’s flaws, while simultaneously highlighting its own values—such as the importance of imagination. Greg is utterly disinterested in all of his parents’ hopes for him. He is not academically engaged and is not interested in preparing for his future, though his mother hopes he will “become an engineer or a doctor or something like that” (129). He does not want to do chores, and he certainly does not want to commit to playing the French horn. In those senses, he is not able or willing to make a commitment and stick to it. Greg is very similar to his brother in this way, although Rodrick Heffley is even less willing to persevere or apply himself to any task. Ironically, the lengths to which Greg is willing to go to avoid commitment itself demonstrates the perseverance of which he is capable, producing a humorous and satisfying punchline for the story.

Although Greg does not want to do the things that his parents think are important, he does have the ability to make a commitment and stick to it when it’s valuable to him. He studies psychology because he wants to talk to a girl. He uses all his cunning to get into the school band because he wants to attend a Halloween party. Of course, neither of these efforts proves ultimately successful. He is able to be ambitious, but he does not yet know how to make that ambition come to fruition, and that very failure provides the foundation for Double Down’s comedic success.

In the end, Double Down’s humor results not because Greg cannot make a commitment, but because he lacks the ability to understand consequences. He prioritizes commitments that do not actually yield much benefit while ignoring opportunities that might get him closer to his goals, and the readers’ ability to recognize that disconnect brings them in on the joke. Of course, Greg is still very young. His perpetual misadventures are inherent to his current stage of personal development. Unlike real middle-schoolers however, Greg’s fate as a fictional character is to be forever stuck in pre-adolescence, making the same mistakes in each successive iteration of his story like Wile E. Coyote and Elmer Fudd before him. Greg’s laziness and propensity to get himself into sticky situations are what make him who he is as a consistent, recognizable, and even relatable character for young readers.