My 20-month-old son Kyle is at that interesting stage of developing a sense of humour.
This week he told me, “I want milk.”
“You want milk?” I asked, just to make sure.
He narrowed his eyes and deepened his voice and replied, “I want mik.”
“You want milk?” I said again.
“I want mk,” he said, then, for good measure, repeated himself several times, emphasising the “mk”.
In their book The Humour Code, behavioural economist Peter McGraw and journalist Joel Warner write, “Laughter develops in infants far earlier than language, usually between 10 and 20 weeks of age. To be clear, what these babies are laughing at isn’t humour as we understand it; they just find certain stimuli pleasurable.”
According to American child psychologists, playing peek-a-boo, “I’m gonna get you”, and raspberrying their tummies are the main things that make infants laugh. My three nieces and my own children also found it hilarious when I pretended to fall down.
But psychologist Paul McGee says that children don’t recognise things as funny until they’re about two-and-a-half years old. This starts with deliberately using objects for the wrong function, like pretending a banana is a telephone. By age three, they deliberately mislabel objects. Kyle already does this with colours, showing me his red toy car and saying, with a sly smile, “I have a green car.” His “mik” joke is a variation of this mislabelling, since he was deliberately mispronouncing “milk”. By age five, children start making jokes about the attributes of objects, like saying ice is hot. And by seven they do wordplay, puns and double meanings.
There is also a sex difference in humour. Generally, boys between the ages of six and 11 try to be funny more often than girls of the same age. I don’t know if this is true of my own children, though. When my daughter Jinaki was 20 months, she was already making jokes. One joke at that age involved repeating what her mother said: as I was putting her to sleep (Jinaki, not her mother) she turned to me and said, “Kevin...babe.” I was not amused, though.
Concomitantly, fathers tend to joke with their children more frequently than mothers, or at least do so in different ways. When children are small, fathers joke through physical play; when the children become teenagers, this interaction becomes more verbal, through wordplay and even sarcasm. “Evidence suggests that fathers may help adolescents develop their own sense of identity and autonomy by being more ‘peer-like’ and more play (joking and teasing), which is likely to promote more equal and egalitarian exchanges,” writes American psychologist Ross D Parke in the essay collection Gender and Parenthood.
I am not sure if this is so true of strict traditional cultures, however, where men’s main value is dignity. I suspect not, since such cultures also tend to have high rates of violence, and one of the functions of humour is to defuse violence. Admittedly, humour can also cause violence, as in mockery, but usually the individuals who react this way themselves lack a sense of humour. Maybe that’s why father-involved cultures tend to be more peaceful and democratic.
At any rate, my children keep me continually amused. And that’s one of the best things about being a parent.
