Tag: funny

Humor’s early days in children

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Young children’s ability to laugh and make jokes has been mapped by age for the first time using data from a new study involving nearly 700 children from birth to 4 years of age, from around the world. The findings, led by University of Bristol researchers and published in Behavior Research Methods, identifies the earliest age humour emerges and how it typically builds in the first years of life…

The team found the earliest reported age that some children appreciated humour was 1 month, with an estimated 50% of children appreciating humour by 2 months, and 50% producing humour by 11 months. The team also show that once children produced humour, they produced it often, with half of children having joked in the last 3 hours.

Of the children surveyed, the team identified 21 different types of humour. Children under one year of age appreciated physical, visual and auditory forms of humour. This included hide and reveal games (e.g., peekaboo), tickling, funny faces, bodily humour (e.g., putting your head through your legs), funny voices and noises, chasing, and misusing objects (e.g., putting a cup on your head).

Dr Elena Hoicka, Associate Professor in Bristol’s School of Education and the study’s lead author, said: “Our results highlight that humour is a complex, developing process in the first four years of life. Given its universality and importance in so many aspects of children’s and adults’ lives, it is important that we develop tools to determine how humour first develops so that we can further understand not only the emergence of humour itself, but how humour may help young children function cognitively, socially, and in terms of mental health.

And laughter is the best medicine…someone first said long before we were born.

Worried citizen calls 911 – coppers start out confused, end up chuckling

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Usually, calling the cops when you see a child being put inside the trunk of a car is a reasonable response. Watch carefully, though, if that car is a Tesla Model S.

On Oct. 30, a neighbor saw a man stuffing a child into the trunk of a car. They called 911. YouTube user Henry Wettstein uploaded security camera footage of what happened next. Police responded, thinking that a kidnapping or at least a serious case of neglect was occurring. Two cruisers immediately descended on the driver as he pulled his Tesla into a driveway. The cops seem tense and are all business in the video, until he opened the trunk and pulled out a little girl.

“Are there seats in there?” one of the officers asked. “Nice. I like that.” The cops have a relieved laugh with the family, though they still ask the man for identification. The rear-facing seats are a $3,000 option on the Model S. The seats are the perfect size for children who love the novelty of backwards travel. They are almost like jump seats. They fold up when not in use and even include a five-point harness style seat belt.

Yup. Don’t hesitate to call the cops if you think someone, a child, anyone is in danger. But, look first and see if that someone putting a child in the boot – is driving electric and upscale.

Are clowns really scary? Ha ha aaaargh!

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klown danger

When Australian singer and TV personality Mark Holden appeared as a clown recently on Channel 7’s Dancing with the Stars, his supposedly “bizarre” behaviour sparked furious debate and complaints to the network, demonstrating the problematic nature of the clown figure today.

The clown has a long history, ranging from the court clowns of ancient Egypt and imperial China, and trickster figures of Native American cultures, through the “sanctioned fool” of Renaissance drama and zanni of the commedia dell arte, to mainstay of the circus in the 19th century…

The decline of touring companies and vaudeville reduced the visibility of the clown in the later 20th century. While clowns still operate in the circus and theatrical entertainments, they are more likely to be found in children’s entertainment, therapeutic and community fields…

…It’s our awareness that there is an offstage self that generates much of our uneasiness around this figure.

In the early 19th century Joseph Grimaldi made the clown a star attraction of British pantomime. As he endured personal tragedies, alcoholism and chronic pain, he also became representative of the “sad clown”, of the clown as a divided figure, split between his comic on-stage identity and melancholic off-stage self…

So, when the jovial onstage figure, whose very existence seems designed to make us laugh, is revealed to be a depressed alcoholic (Grimaldi), or rage-driven killer (France’s Jean-Gaspard Deburau), or convicted sex-offender (Australia’s Jack Perry, the “Zig” of Zig and Zag).

Undoubtedly, the most notorious of such cases is that of John Wayne Gacy, an amateur clown who was convicted of killing 33 boys and young men in Illinois in the 1970s…

One of the most notable influences was Stephen King’s novel It (1986), filmed in 1990 with Tim Curry as the murderous supernatural being which takes human form as “Pennywise the Dancing Clown”.

The ubiquity of the “dark clown” trope is evident in itself becoming the stuff of comedy, as in Seinfeld episode The Opera, and the character of Krusty the Clown, a depressive with substance-abuse issues, in The Simpsons.

The context is unimportant; but, I spent a short while on the inside of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. I met Emmett Kelly there. Most clowns I ever met don’t like to break character as long as they are in makeup. And Kelly was always in makeup.

Which meant he never spoke to anyone – including everyone he worked with. Because Weary Willie didn’t speak.

You can build a scary plot just out of that.