It’s Kind of a Funny Story Study Guide

Ned Vizzini was born in New York City and grew up in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. He attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He began writing and publishing essays as a teenager, and these early works were eventually published together in his first book, the memoir Teen Angst? Naaah.... Vizzini attended Hunter College and eventually published his first novel, Be More Chill, in 2004, which was a critical and commercial success. His second novel, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, published in 2006, remains perhaps his best-known work. It was later adapted into a film in 2010. Vizzini continued to write books, essays, criticism, and television during the last years of his life. He died by suicide in 2013.

It’s Kind of a Funny Story is set sometime in the early 2000s, when awareness of mental health issues was spreading but when the topic still carried greater stigma than it does today. Vizzini was an advocate for mental health in real life, and his novel references some of the real-life resources for people struggling with depression, including suicide hotlines. The first suicide prevention services in the United States began in the 1950s. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-273-8255), first became available in 2005, not long before the publication of It’s Kind of a Funny Story. Although that number remains available as a suicide hotline in the United States, 2022 marked the launch of a new number, 988, which was created to be shorter and easier to remember. Canada launched a similar 988 number the following year. Vizzini’s novel also references an ongoing controversy in education about the role of standardized testing. The character Craig experiences anxiety over the difficult tests he must pass to get into his competitive high school. Defenders of standardized tests claim that they help to provide an objective way to measure students, while opponents claim that existing standardized tests are flawed and may perpetuate racial or economic biases in society.

Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story is part of a long tradition of novels about young adults as they deal with mental health issues. Some notable examples include The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. One of the other direct influences on It’s Kind of a Funny Story is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (as well as its film adaptation). Kesey’s novel, while also darkly humorous, ultimately portrays life in a psychiatric hospital in a negative light, featuring a cruel nurse runs things like a prison. Although the colorful characters of Vizzini’s novel bear some resemblance to those in Kesey’s, Vizzini ultimately presents a much more optimistic view of life in a psychiatric hospital, reflecting both Vizzini’s different beliefs about the value of therapy as well as how mental health care in the United States had changed since the 1960s. Vizzini’s novel has played a role in inspiring some of the young adult novels about mental health that followed it, including Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher and All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven.