I’m not saying he’s right or not an idiot/jerk- but the larger joke is that he though the title “animal farm” sounded like a children a book and didn’t actually know of the book.
That said- at least for my time in school, Animal Farm was a required reading assignment in the 4th grade. So it is still not only dumb, but extremely obnoxious- but slightly less comically dumb if he too had that book as required reading as a child and thusly assumed that it was a children a book. While there were some in the class who got elements of the larger themes from the book, I can say from what I recall, most kids myself included missed a lot of the less than subtle but more political points of the book and viewed it in a more simplistic sense concerning prejudices or at the least a story about some jerks.
That said- at least for my time in school, Animal Farm was a required reading assignment in the 4th grade. So it is still not only dumb, but extremely obnoxious- but slightly less comically dumb if he too had that book as required reading as a child and thusly assumed that it was a children a book. While there were some in the class who got elements of the larger themes from the book, I can say from what I recall, most kids myself included missed a lot of the less than subtle but more political points of the book and viewed it in a more simplistic sense concerning prejudices or at the least a story about some jerks.