Humor in children: from peekaboo to irony

Oliver is three and he has a joke. He plants himself in the middle of the living room, announces that a banana is a shoe, and sits down on the floor laughing. Emma laughs with him the first time, nods the tenth time, and by the twentieth she is quietly working out how long this phase lasts.

What Oliver is doing is harder than it looks. To break a rule you have to know it first: he knows what a banana is, he knows what a shoe is, and he mixes the two on purpose to see what happens. A toddler's first jokes are not a sense of humor yet. They are a test of where the sensible world ends.

Peekaboo to irony takes about ten years

The American psychologist Paul McGhee described the growth of children's humor as a sequence of stages in which the amount of laughing stays roughly the same while the trigger keeps moving. The youngest children laugh at movement and surprise, preschoolers at nonsense, school-age children at words with two meanings, and only teenagers at what a person says without meaning it. The ages are approximate and children skip in both directions, but the order is unexpectedly stable.

Peekaboo is the first funny situation in most human lives. It runs on tension and safety at once: the child does not know when the face comes back, but knows that it will. When that gets confirmed, the tension drops and laughter comes out. Stay hidden a few seconds too long and the joke tips over into crying. The line between funny and frightening is already thin at eighteen months.

The oddest stage is the one where a child masters the shape of a joke before the content. A five-year-old announces that he has a joke for you, gets the tone right, pauses in the right place, and the punchline is: and then he fell in the soup. Then he laughs and waits. Nothing has gone wrong. He is rehearsing the choreography of telling, useful in a group of children long before the ability to build a double meaning.

The end of that sequence carries the most practical consequence. Irony arrives last and ripens across primary school, in some people into their teens. "Oh, that was clever" said over a puddle of spilled juice therefore does not land as exaggeration for a five-year-old. He hears either praise he cannot make sense of, or a tone that stings. Sarcasm from a parent is not harsh to a small child. It is unreadable, and the child keeps the worse half.

Why the same joke fifty times

When Oliver arrives with the banana for the fiftieth time, it is neither provocation nor a test of patience. Repetition is how a small child learns. Every repeat is really a question: does this still hold, and will the reaction be the same? The predictability that bores an adult is a source of certainty for a three-year-old, who is confirming that the world behaves reliably.

The other half of the answer is social. Robert Provine, in his book Laughter (2000), summarized observations of ordinary conversations and found that laughter is about thirty times more likely in company than alone, and that most laughter follows not a joke but an ordinary sentence. We laugh mainly because somebody is there. Oliver is not testing the joke. He is testing the connection to you.

When did you last laugh out loud on your own in an empty room? Most people need a moment to come up with an answer, and that is exactly the mechanism running at full volume in children.

There is some relief in this for parents. You do not have to laugh every time, and a faked laugh gets caught anyway, because children read tone before words. Something else works better: move the joke along. When Emma answers with the time she wore a slipper on her head, Oliver gets a new variation and the game moves a step forward instead of a twentieth lap in the same place.

Toilet humor and why banning it fails

Somewhere between three and six comes the stage that reliably wears parents down. The child discovers words like poo, bum and toilet and works out that they function as a switch. Say one at lunch and something big happens. Someone laughs, someone else raises a voice. Either way, the room reacts.

The point is that the child has no idea why those words are taboo. The content is not the attraction, the power is. And because a strong reaction is a reward, a hard ban usually strengthens this humor rather than damping it: it confirms that the word carries the power that made it worth saying.

A rule about place and time works better. Not at the table and not at grandma's, as much as you like in the playground. The child then hears not that the joke is bad but that different places run on different rules, exactly the skill needed for the rest of life. A flat non-reaction helps when the child is fishing for a rise: with no fuel, the motive burns out. And like the stages before it, this one passes, usually around the start of school.

Teasing between siblings: when to leave it alone

Dacher Keltner and his colleagues described teasing in 2001 as a social game with rules. Between people who trust each other it strengthens the bond, because it says "I can go this far with you and we are still fine". Without that trust the same sentence wounds. Siblings are the first laboratory for that difference, practiced precisely by overshooting now and then.

Most household teasing therefore needs no intervention. You can tell by several things at once:

• the roles swap, one of them is the target now and the other one in a minute
• both of them are laughing, not only the one making the joke
• when one says stop, the other stops and does not add one last go
• the subject moves on rather than circling the same spot

Stepping in pays off when one of those is missing. The strongest warning sign is a fixed target: the same sibling is on the receiving end every time and the subject repeats, usually the most tender thing they know about each other. Weight, glasses, grades, being scared of the dark. The second sign is laughter on one side only: the other one is either blank-faced or laughing a couple of seconds late. Where the border between fun and putting someone down actually runs is worked through in more detail in the piece on teasing versus mocking.

One change of wording helps when you do step in. Instead of "don't be mean", try naming the effect: "look, she has stopped laughing." The first sentence judges the child, the second teaches him to read another person, the whole reason teasing is worth letting exist. It is also worth having a family word that always stops everything, with no negotiating and no mockery of whoever used it.

Home is where children learn whose expense to laugh at

Rod Martin and his colleagues described a model of four humor styles in 2003, built on two questions: whether the tone is warm or sharp, and whether the humor points at other people or at yourself. That produces the bonding, self-enhancing, sharp and self-mocking styles, and because the two axes are independent, nobody is only one of them. The overview of the four humor styles goes through them in detail.

Children do not take jokes home from the family. They take the settings of those two axes. When laughter in a house is used mostly to make people comfortable together, a child treats that as the default state of things. When the family laughs mostly at the neighbors, at colleagues or at whoever has just made a mistake, the child learns that a joke is a way of putting somebody in their place.

The self-mocking part is the least conspicuous. A parent who regularly describes himself as a clumsy idiot with a head like a sieve means it as modesty. What the child reads is an instruction for how you talk about yourself. Research on humor styles says honestly that the warm registers go with better wellbeing and the self-mocking one with worse, but that is an association and not a cause, and one self-deprecating remark over dinner is not worth over-reading. The difference is whether it is seasoning or the main course.

None of the four styles is a fault to be removed. A sharp remark has its place in a family just as warm lightness does, and it is simply useful to know which register your child has heard from you most often. A humor style is a habit rather than a verdict on character, and habits can be worked with.

The class clown gets both the benefits and the bill

Sooner or later word comes home from school that your child entertains the class. That role is neither a defect nor a win. It is a working social strategy with measurable returns: a child who can make a classroom laugh gains standing without being best at maths or fastest in the yard. The role also trains him to read the mood of a group, because otherwise the jokes would not land.

The bill arrives from two directions. The first is how sticky the role gets: once everybody expects a line from you, a serious sentence becomes harder to say and sadness barely fits inside the part. The second is school, which sees disruption rather than skill, so the child hears regularly that the best thing he does is a problem.

Occasionally there is a third thing underneath. When a child aims mostly at himself, it can be a way of getting ahead of everyone else's mockery: whoever picks the target keeps others from picking it. That is worth noticing, though not worth a lecture. There is no point dismantling the role; the point is adding a second place where the child has standing from something else, a club or a group outside the classroom.

And because the model a child copies sits at the same table, it makes sense to look at yourself first. A short humor styles test gives you a sense of which of the four registers dominates at home; it asks about everyday situations and takes a few minutes.

The next time Oliver announces that a banana is a shoe, one small detail is worth catching. He is not looking at the banana. He is looking at Emma.