Danny ChaiI find it fascinating how kids develop a sense of humor. I guess kids’ development in all aspects is fascinating, but the humor thing I find particularly interesting. What makes something funny to a kid? How do they learn about humor?
After watching a video of Ellie singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat, I was really excited to sing it with her when I saw her in New York. But by that time, she had changed how she sang it. When we got to the “merrily” part, she’d substitute “dream” for random words. For example: “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a… lollipop.” And so forth.
When it was my turn, I did my typical sophomoric humor thing and said “Life is but a… buttcrack” (it’s an inside joke*). At which she laughed, paused, and said “that’s funny”. Which, of course, it was. I just thought it was interesting that she thought so. It’s not physical humor, which all kids get. It’s not exactly wit either, but it’s the beginnings of verbal humor. And how do kids learn to understand and appreciate that? It’s fascinating to me. They’re coming in a week so I’ll get a chance to try out more verbal humor with her then.
*I think I wrote about this before already, but last Christmas, Ellie would speak what sounded like gibberish, then my sister would give a translation, to which Ellie would respond “yeah”. So the exchange would go something like
Ellie: “Bwa wa fumtoo twee”.
My sister: “You’re interested in the application of Hidden Markov Models in object tracking for computer vision?”
Ellie: “Yeah.”
I’m exaggerating, but you get my point. I couldn’t quite see the connection between Ellie’s gibberish and my sister’s supposed translation. I had a sneaking suspicion that Ellie would just respond yes to words that she recognized. I wasn’t even sure she understood grammar yet. So I did a test with her, speaking a stream of words that she understood with no structure to it. And one of the words in her vocabulary was “buttcrack”. So for example: “Uncle Sammy wawa buttcrack Cookie Monster here at Gymboree?” And she’d pause, then say, “no…” So I guess she did understand some grammar. But I’m still not positive she was saying what my sister said she was saying. Although I’m probably wrong.