For many centuries, from the Greek scholars to the 20th century, humour was seen by philosophers as a rather debased form of intellectual activity. This is actually a very recent cultural development in Western society. We appreciate the value of play and the right to play is enshrined in the human rights convention on the rights of the child. Nowadays, most of us are fortunate to live in a world where the value of levity and laughter is appreciated. In their case, their worries need to be acknowledged and their privacy respected. Some children with a fear of germs, a heightened sensory aversion, problems with incontinence or a fear of public exposure, may just find the whole business too worrying or unpleasant to laugh about. Toilet humour tends to fade with age but usually sticks around in everyone to some extent, though not everyone finds it funny to begin with. Toilet humour is therefore a natural part of their development. They are also playing with the action of toileting, the social conventions around it and the possible shameful consequences of incontinence. The three-year-old running round the house saying “poo” or pretending to go to the toilet is arguably appreciating the incongruity of being able to use the word liberally. This means they are becoming self-aware, learning about pretence and learning that words can stand for objects. The Conversation, CC BY-ND 7.23 MB (download)īetween the age of two and three, children’s learning explodes as they develop the cognitive capacity to create “secondary” mental representations of the world that are distinct from primary representations of reality. When we play games, it is important to make sure all the players know it is a game, and so we have laughter to give a clear signal.Įxtract from The Anthill 16 podcast: Humour Me, on children’s toilet humour. Sometimes, we use the words in different contexts to see what effects they have. We play with funny faces, gestures and language, using the same words in different ways to make them mean different things. And social interaction skills are a very important part of this. As well as its role in social bonding, play is something that we all must do in order to practise a range of skills, which will be required for survival and reproductive success. Humour can thereby be understood as a critical aspect of social play. But if the child has separation anxiety, is scared of the stranger playing the game, or is long past the stage of understanding the concept of object permanency, the game of peek-a-boo is no longer funny. For infants, the game of peek-a-boo may be a lot of fun because it is playing with both the threat of separation, and the concept of “object permanence” (when the young child is still learning that when something is out of sight it can be hidden rather than being no longer there). The other key quality is the social tension that gives rise to humour. Evidence shows that once the cognitive level has been passed, the subject loses its potency. Incongruity is a key quality of amusement and that has to be pitched at the right level and in the right context for the recipient to be tickled. One is that children find things funny when they are stretching their cognitive abilities.
Guys, are you not a bit old for that kind of joke? Jason Salmon/Shutterstock Laughter of a sort is also seen among non-human primates, occurring during playful social interactions and laughing together is an important part of social bonding.
Anywhere you find people, you will find laughter. Humour is after all a universal aspect of human behaviour. Modern research focuses more on such behaviour as an important part of the development of humour in children. While it is true that there are usually tensions around learning the toileting process for children at this age, such theories no longer have much bearing on our thinking. Perhaps most famously, Sigmund Freud argued that at this age, the child is going through an “ anal stage” when he or she gets immense psychosexual pleasure from the development of anal control through toilet training. Just running around the house saying the word “poo” out loud can often unleash hysterical laughter. While most of us can appreciate a joke about excrement, preschoolers and children often find it hilarious on a completely different level. The man tells the little boy: “I’m taking it home to put on my strawberries.” The boy looks up at the man and says: “I don’t know where you come from, but where I come from we put cream and sugar on our strawberries.” A boy meets a man carrying a load of cow manure and asks him what he is going to do with it all.