Travel has downsides (unrelated to being stranded with bronchitis in a motel room in an unfamiliar town…)
My wife has informed me that my two-year-old son is now telling knock-knock jokes. I’m told that I am not missing anything yet, as the jokes do not in fact make sense, but there is a larger issue afoot about the role of syntax and learning abstractions. I’ve discovered that in my country abstract thinking, at its core, is fruity.
This is my boy, Ryan. (No, this is not a picture of his first knock-knock joke, but you can already see his appreciation for the art of working a crowd. Either that, or he’s trying to swat the camera out of my wife’s hand. I’d bet on the latter.)
Over the last few weeks, Ryan has started getting more vocal, and stringing together sentences that contain the three main parts: subject, verb, object. He’s not nearly as verbal as his big sister, and as such these developments are easier for me to pick up (especially the second time around.) Such as the fact that in both cases, the first jokes they told were knock-knocks.
Knock KnockWho’s there?Repeated pattern
Repeated pattern who?
Whoa-hoa there, Ryan… you can’t really blame me for not noticing for what now seems obvious, but you can’t really lay claim to a pattern until it repeats in some way. If I told you that 1/7 is almost the same as 14.2857 percent, and asked you to refine it, you’d want to see a pattern first. If you saw instead that the pattern was 14.2857142857142857142857…
It’s easier to see the block when it comes back around. And such is the nature of syntax and context. One is the container that allows us to analyze the other. It’s the essence of intelligence and learning – examine an unknown by its relationships to a known.
Then there is the essence of humor: the exploitation of of a mistaken notion or a double-meaning for an unexpected end. (my definition, anyway.) We hail humorists as being clever in their wordplay, and their ability to weave concepts together. Even comedians who play “dumb” characters are branded as comic “genius,” for the way they play to our base instincts and raw truths. When they are on their game, they invite us in to enjoy their tortured logic, as they twist ordinary memes into extraordinary new insights. Or they just sucker us in for a fart joke out of the blue (literally).
Knock KnockWho’s there?Repeated pattern
Repeated pattern who?
So how does one come to appreciate irony and humor? On a strictly literal level, such information can radically confuse one who is really trying to learn something like – say – a language. Which brings us back to the inherent “stickiness” of the knock-knock meme.
- it’s got internal rhythm
- it’s easy to remember
- the template is the same
- the template is long enough to announce a coming twist
- the relevant setup for the punchline is always in the same place
Think about the last time you read one of those really long “groaner” puns. The kind that don’t have paragraph breaks, but should. (Yes, the cleverness of a pun is partially a function of its brevity, but you’ve seen some looooooong ones before, I know.) The fun of reading along with a pun is analyzing as you go, trying to predict where it is going to end up. It’s a way to one-up the person who wrote the joke, and assert your own cleverness by breaking the code. It’s hard though, because you don’t always know what or where the signposts are.
Knock-knock jokes take care of that. The proof comes from the jokes kids begin with:
Knock KnockWho’s there?“Random Object” in my field of vision
“Random Object” who?“Random Object”“Other Random Object”
that is unrelated. HA HA HA!
Ta da! The anatomy of a joke, deconstructed. It isn’t supposed to make sense yet, because my son only understands the rhythm of the structure to be funny. Eventually, there will be enough internal clues for him to figure out why a particular juxtaposition works – partially derived from internal joke context, partially from language skills external to any known knock-knock joke.
Personally, I find it interesting that this is not just the first real verbal meme for most children — it’s also the seed that spawns the first meta-meme. “Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?” is more than just a universally recognized punchline. It’s also the point when a child is able to discover humor outside of the rigid constraint, because the humor is not just “context” anymore. It’s a twist on the syntax, or structure of speech.
Syntax and context, like apples and oranges, belong in the same bowl. As it happens, the essence of abstract thinking – at least for American children – is a matter of oranges and bananas. And this post is proof that I need to avoid shopping for metaphors so close to dinnertime.
An aside: can you remember your child’s first joke? What was it? Comment below…
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, humor, communication theory, humor theory[/tags]
It’s awesome watching your little ones become larger ones, and I had never thought about the way onomatopoeia and homonyms were first introduced…
cool.
Well, currently, Julia’s joke is on her Daddy. She loves to spit out her pacifier only to have him put it back in. She laughs when she does it, therefore, I think its a joke she is pulling on Mic. Really, I understand that it is a game they are playing, but she doesn’t have the verbal skills yet for jokes.
She is vocal though!