The dreaded knock knock joke

You know that feeling you get when you're driving along and you hear the words 'knock knock' uttered from your toddlers mouth. Your world darkens and you have an overwhelming urge to fall asleep because you know that in just a few seconds that very child will have killed about a thousand of your precious brain cells just trying to figure out how a cat being at the door can be so funny. It's painful but it happens and I'm going to tell you why.

As you can imagine there are hundreds of theories out there about how the little ones get their own sense of humour; but i only have enough characters to tell you a few.

Dr Gina Mireault says that between the ages of six months to one year, children give a home to a similar sense of humour to their parents. She proposes that children observe the reaction of their parents to social absurdities and then imitate their reaction. Thus, allowing the child to laugh at the same things as their parents. However this does not mean that the child are actually understanding what their laughing at so don't panic!  

Many theories of humour attempt to explain how children can hold the same cognitive processes needed by an adult to comprehend adult humour types. And many get to the conclusion that incongruity is the basis on which all humour is built. Incongruity is what the person expects and what they actually experience and it is the resolution of the incongruous element that causes the understanding of the punch line of a joke. It is proposed that children have their own cognitive rules allowing them to resolve incongruities however with these rules there has to be a backup of common knowledge. Due to the fact that children in their early years hold very little common knowledge in comparison to us adults; they do not find adult jokes funny and therefore take it upon themselves to create their own jokes. This is why you will often find that only children laugh at each other's jokes.

Julia Gillen proposed that a child's language acquisition relates to their sense of humour. Children in their early years will observe and imitate the sounds and expressions made by other language users around them to build up their speech. Quickly the child will understand that the English language relies largely on a tense basis and will begin the form language rules for themselves, for example all past tense words end in '-ed'. They will generalize this rule to all past tense words and then churn out lexis such as 'goed' and 'bringed'. Hearing other language users speak the correct word form 'went' is an obscurity. It is something they understand but do not know where to apply or why adults say it. Bizarrely they find this humorous.

Next time you hear a small child tell a joke have a think about how they came to find it funny, you may surprise yourself!

Charly Dinnage