The novel presents vivid sketches of family members, friends, school teachers, shown co-operating, arguing, loving, and living.

Tension mounts as the riots come closer to home, and the whole family sleeps in their shoes so they can quickly escape should the Sinhalese mobs descend.

When Selvadurai's Funny Boy was published in 1994, it was hailed as one of the most powerful renditions of the trauma of the prevailing ethnic tensions in contemporary Sri Lanka.

Although she receives an engagement offer from Rajan Nagendra, she is reluctant and develops a friendship with Anil Jayasinghe, a Sinhalese who is also involved in the play.

In the third story, while Arjie's father is in Europe on a business trip, Daryl Uncle returns to Sri Lanka from Australia to investigate allegations of government torture.

Arjie is cognizant of a long history between Amma and Daryl Uncle but is unsure of the cause of the tensions until he has an eventual realization of their affair.

Although Amma tries to pursue the matter further, a civil rights lawyer tells her that there is nothing they can do, given the state of the country, and that "one must be like the three wise monkeys.

The function and specific poems are especially important to "Black Tie" as they are his final plea to prevent the government from reorganizing the school.

During the school function, Arjie purposely jumbles up his poem after he witnesses Shehan emotionally break down from Black Tie's beatings.

In "Pigs Can't Fly", Arjie and his female cousins reenact a Sri Lankan marriage in the game of "bride-bride".

The draping of the white sari, allows him to "leave the constraints of [his] self and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self, a self to whom this day was dedicated" (5).

As the novel is set during and at the start of the Sri Lankan civil war, the characters are impacted, and constrained, on an individual level by the tensions between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority, which includes Arjie and his family.

Arjie's father foresees the difficulties of being a minority Tamil and enrolls his sons in Sinhalese language classes at school, so that future opportunities are not limited to them.

Arjie's father is optimistic and is eager to see the tensions between the two ethnic groups end, and is reluctant to see that the best option for his family is to immigrate to Canada.

Throughout the novel, Arjie is also increasingly aware of his feelings towards the boys in his school, accepting that he thinks of the shorts they wear and longs to be with them (208).

The origin of many important themes in Funny Boy is the increasingly serious tensions between Tamils and Sinhalese while Arjie is growing up in Sri Lanka.

[citation needed] Edward Hower reviewing the book for The Times wrote “Throughout Funny Boy, Shyam Selvadurai writes as sensitively about the emotional intensity of adolescence as he does about the wonder of childhood.

He also paints an affectionate picture of an imperfect family in a lost paradise, struggling to stay together in troubled times.”[4] Richard Eder of Los Angeles Times wrote that “With odd quiet and intimacy, the Sri Lanka novelist Shyam Selvadurai depicts a family’s agony on the fault line of a country cracking apart.”[5] In 2018, it was announced that Deepa Mehta would adapt the novel into a film.