Childhood Laughter; Adult Friends
I’ve been thinking this week, thanks to an amusing Twitter thread, about children and jokes. It’s a widely accepted fact that children are, often unintentionally, masters of anti-humour and the absurd. A child’s sense of humour begins as a baby, where they learn to spot patterns and disrupt them for a laugh, or to playfully test limits and boundaries. We then start to master language, and revel in using words incorrectly on purpose to see what effect this might have on our peers and the adults around us. Humour is a way to learn what happens if we subvert expectations, or to experiment with topics that might, in other contexts, cause fear, embarrassment, or shame. Once they’re old enough to understand more complex linguistic jokes, children love anti-humour and unexpected punchlines that seem to come out of nowhere. My favourite joke as a small child was, “What’s brown and sticky? A stick.” My friend Mike similarly enjoyed the joke: “What did Batman say to Robin before they got in the car? ‘Get in the car’” — a brilliant example of anti-humour at work.
Beginning to tell “knock knock” jokes shows cognitive development: even if children tend to substitute a range of words in lieu of set ups and punchlines that make sense, they understand the structure of the joke, the performance of the fake dialogue between the teller and the respondent, the importance of the roles of the trickster and the naïf. When I was a small child, I used to get quite confused by the joke:
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Isabelle
Isabelle who?
Isabelle necessary on a bicycle
Not the most sidesplitting “knock knock” joke in the world, for sure, but even less funny if, as I used to, you think you can substitute any name instead of Isabelle — I couldn’t hear the pun at that age, I couldn’t conceive of the word “Isabelle” shifting from its linguistic category of “name” to “start of a question”. But I must have heard an adult laugh at that joke, so I laughed at it all the same, and tried to invent my own versions, with the names of people I knew “necessary on a bicycle” — when the adults around me didn’t laugh at my new tellings of the joke, I was very perplexed.
Absurdity and incongruity are often key features of children’s humour, particularly as they’re starting to develop more sophisticated social skills. My partner Joe told me that his favourite joke as a child was, “Why don’t polar bears eat penguins? Because they can’t get the wrappers off.” A great joke, truly a classic for the ages (and discussing this even prompted us to buy Penguin bars this week), but young Joe didn’t quite grasp that the humour of the joke is meant to lie in the double meaning of penguin, and the expectation of a factual punchline (polar bears and penguins live on opposite continents) — he found amusement simply in the image of a polar bear trying to eat a chocolate bar, and thus would replace “penguin” with any other chocolate bar he fancied. “Why don’t polar bears eat Snickers?” Mike confessed to me that his “Funniest Thing Ever” as a child was a series of books about two monkeys called Bangers and Mash — according to Mike, one of the books opens with an illustration of a nice house accompanied by the sentence “This house belongs to Bangers and Mash”. This was basically guaranteed to make Mike wet himself with laughter. (Knowing Mike as an adult, this origin story explains a lot about his current sense of humour.)
In terms of reading, I would say that my sense of humour was crystallised by three main pieces of literature: first, Do Gerbils Go To Heaven?, an entry in the now out-of-print Jeremy James series by David Henry Wilson. So influential was this book on my household that my dad, who loved reading it to me, still sometimes uses Jeremy’s dad’s response to awkward questions — “Worple worple semantics”. Wilson was brilliant at writing from the perspective of Jeremy James, an annoying, precocious, but well-meaning child, and presenting the world through his eyes. I remember finding a lot humour aimed at children quite difficult to relate to because so much of it centred around mischief, and although I wouldn’t claim I was totally well-behaved 100% of the time, I was very nervous about the idea of getting into trouble, and struggled to enjoy that sort of Beano brand of humour. Jeremy James was a perfect character for me — the humour often derived from his misunderstanding of the world around him, and it was perfectly pitched so that the reader would grasp situations just a few moments ahead of the protagonist, opening up the possibilities of at once empathising with Jeremy James’ position and being in on the joke at the same time. Wilson’s writing also sometimes showed Jeremy James as being in the right, with the adults who were so dismissive of him proved wrong as the short stories progressed.
The second touchstone for humour I have from my childhood reading were the Jiggy McCue books by Michael Lawrence, now also quite difficult to get hold of. There are, apparently, sixteen in total, although I think I only read the first six, with book one, The Poltergoose, being my favourite, and the first three were on pretty much constant rotation for me. There was something about the bathos of Jiggy’s suburban life when combined with the range of supernatural encounters he and his friends had to deal with that was deeply funny for me, and so many of the little observations stand out: Jiggy’s mum’s prized rockery, for example, which he ruins by rolling all over in The Killer Underpants, or the difficulties of moving house and not living next door to your best friends, and the class implications of that new house being in a shiny new-build estate in The Poltergoose. In most of Jiggy’s stories, the main peril is the danger of social embarrassment, while the threat comes from somewhere completely absurd — the ghost of a farmer’s pet goose, a computer program that can make you swap bodies, pants that make people obey your orders…
The third series I found incredibly formative, this time as a slightly older child, were the Lemony Snicket books. Not only did I devour the hidden codes and hints at secret organisations — I might have read Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography more than any of the installations in the main series — I also absorbed Daniel Handler’s dark humour into my very core. The books are filled with absurd imagery, at once threatening and hilariously incongruous (think the tagliatelle grande Count Olaf’s henchman uses to keep the carnival workers in line), and inventive uses of language. Handler-as-Snicket turns everyday phrases to sinister purposes in order to show how language and meaning can be turned upside down by adults with nefarious intentions, as well as famously using his narrator’s asides to “explain” certain terms, sometimes more accurately than others. Part of the joy and excitement in reading these books is recognising when these definitions slip from the general into the specific world of the Baudelaire children. For me, reading this series was also an introduction into the world of meta-fiction, as Handler carefully modulates Snicket’s own role in the story, playing with the ways readers will so naturally assume the presence of an omniscient narrator before subverting that assumption in blackly comic ways.
“Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear. Some people say that a sunrise is a miracle, because it is somewhat mysterious and often very beautiful, but other people say it is simply a fact of life, because it happens every day and far too early in the morning. Some people say that a telephone is a miracle, because it sometimes seems wondrous that you can talk with somebody who is thousands of miles away, and other people say it is merely a manufactured device fashioned out of metal parts, electronic circuitry, and wires that are very easily cut. And some people say that sneaking out of a hotel is a miracle, particularly if the lobby is swarming with policemen, and other people say it is simply a fact of life, because it happens every day and far too early in the morning. So you might think that there are so many miracles in the world that you can scarcely count them, or that there are so few that they are scarcely worth mentioning, depending on whether you spend your mornings gazing at a beautiful sunset or lowering yourself into a back alley with a rope made of matching towels.”
Even now, if I’m having a really difficult time, I will listen to the audiobooks of A Series Of Unfortunate Events, most of which are read brilliantly by Tim Curry, and the ones that aren’t are read equally brilliantly by Daniel Handler himself. The Netflix series based on the books is surprisingly excellent, by the way, and as someone who was utterly obsessed I think I can authoritatively say that while it’s not always completely true to the plot, the series does capture the mood and tone of the books well. Neil Patrick Harris is a superb Count Olaf, and while Patrick Warburton doesn’t match up perfectly to the Lemony Snicket in my mind, his deep, reassuring voice juxtaposes perfectly with the depressing events he is compelled to narrate. I’m glad too that the TV series has opened the books up to a new audience of young readers again: to me, books for children about the ways adults can deceive, twist language, manipulate others, and blatantly lie, often without consequences, are integral to surviving in a “post-truth” world. A Series Of Unfortunate Events is really a narrative of how even the most laughable tyrants maintain power, and how compassion — which reading fiction teaches — can be, if not a weapon against them, a salve for the harm they can cause.
If we accept humour as a bonding activity — children may laugh at their own jokes, sure, but they do understand that at least part of what makes a joke amusing is in the exchange between the teller and the audience — what we find funny is completely integral to how we make friends. It’s almost like finding someone who speaks the same language. This is true also when you discover that someone read the same books as you during their childhood, especially when it comes to these kind of formative funny books. If I meet someone else who cares as much about Lemony Snicket as I do, I know we will share a similar way of looking at the world.
When I first met my friend Mike, mentioned previously, we instantly clicked: it took only a matter of months for us to be confiding in each other about our deepest secrets and truths. We worked together for a year, and were, inside and outside of work, almost inseparable — as much as we can be now we don’t work in the same building, we still are. I talk to Mike pretty much every day. He’s the first person I contact if I’m feeling down, and usually the first person I go to with new jokes or memes too. He is undoubtedly one of my best friends, one of the closest and dearest people in my life. A huge part of our friendship and why it progressed so quickly is a shared sense of humour: we tell each other ridiculous jokes, and find the most stupid things funny when we’re with each other — things which it’s impossible to explain to anyone else. I have more inside jokes with Mike than with almost anyone else I know. What an absolute joy it was to find out this week when asking him for his favourite childhood joke that he too was a fan of the Jiggy McCue books, that he also read them over and over as a kid, just like I did. We have so many cultural touchstones in common, of course, growing up at the same time in middle class families with similar comedic tastes, but in finding out that we both loved Jiggy McCue so much in our younger years, I feel almost like we’ve found the root of our shared language.
