For example: “What did one Frenchman say to the other? I don’t know. Which, coincidentally, sometimes results in jokes that resemble a more advanced form of humor: an “anti-joke.” Anti-jokes deliberately deny the audience a clever or satisfying punch line, and they often serve as edgy or sophisticated commentary on jokes themselves.
“But they haven’t got the sophistication to construct an incongruity that’s going to be resolvable.” I’ll show you some incongruity,’” Dubinsky says. “Kids say, ‘Oh, jokes are about incongruity. “Even when their parents are feeding them ‘dad jokes’ to try to teach them about humor, half of the jokes that kids hear, they don’t quite get.” So it’s only natural, Dubinsky says, for some children to believe that a couple of absurd or mismatched concepts assembled into a familiar “knock-knock” or “What do you call …” structure adds up to a joke.
Kids, especially those younger than grade school–age, are frequently exposed to jokes they don’t understand, Dubinsky says, and not just those that are thrown into Pixar movies for the benefit of parents. And what makes it a joke, he explains, is that it presents an “incongruity”-a surprising and perplexing query or situation-and then resolves it coherently. Stanley Dubinsky, an English professor at the University of South Carolina and the author of Understanding Language Through Humor, agrees that kids tend to tell bizarre jokes because they haven’t yet mastered what exactly makes a joke, a joke. But when preschool-age kids attempt to tell jokes, “because it’s so nonsensical and cute, they do get a lot of reactions,” which can then encourage more joke-telling attempts. “ get a lot of unfortunate reactions to the swearing,” McCabe laughs. The same goes for saying swear words, McCabe adds-minus the approval part. Kids also tend to pick up on the fact that when an adult tells a joke, the joke teller is often rewarded with attention and approval, which can be empowering to the teller. Similarly, McCabe says, slightly older children-often around preschool age-learn the rhythms and formats of jokes without really understanding how humor is supposed to work, resulting in nonsense that has the shape of a joke but isn’t, really. (There’s a whole delightful genre of “expressive jargon” baby videos on YouTube, McCabe points out, for those who are curious.) According to Allyssa McCabe, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who specializes in children’s language development, little kids’ jokes are a bit like babies’ babbling: Babies learn the sounds and rhythms of spoken communication before they learn actual words, which results in “expressive jargon,” the instinctive language of babies that lacks real words but nonetheless still conveys when they’re inquisitive, when they’re pleased, and when they’re upset. There are a few different reasons kids make these weird, often wildly unfunny jokes. “Knock, knock.” “Who’s there?” “Do you want me to wash your house?” “No, thank you.” “Okay.” “Why didn’t the dog have a family? Because it was too stinky to have one.” “A man and a lizard walk into a bar and the barman says, ‘No lizards.’” “Who is smelly and has no body? A pumpkin.” The Tumblr page Kids Write Jokes, launched in 2012, offers hundreds of jokes that are a lot like my old guitar joke-in other words, they sound like jokes, but they’re amusing more because they’re bizarre than because they’re clever. Guitar if you don’t have a house is a typical example of a kid punch line-strange, absurd, of unknown origins.
My mom laughs more now telling me about my meaningless, weirdly endearing stand-up routine than she ever did at my performance of it. It’s just a bunch of words that are familiar to small children, arranged haphazardly within the well-known structure of a knock-knock joke. Not only is it not a sentence, but there is no pun or wordplay to catch onto, no meta-textual wink to make it a joke about jokes. Guitar if you don’t have a house? Literally nothing is funny or clever about Guitar if you don’t have a house. “Knock, knock.” “Who’s there?” “Guitar.” “Guitar who?” “Guitar if you don’t have a house!”Įvery time I delivered the punch line, I would look expectantly at my audience, who would, after a moment, either politely chuckle or just squint in bewilderment.
When I was 4, my favorite joke to tell my family members went like this:
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