Laughing children and funny children – laughter and early childhood

Abstract

 

The lives of children and young people are largely marked by laughter. Statistically, children laugh significantly more often than adults. This paper explores laughter among preschool children, focusing on the ways in which they laugh, make each other laugh in everyday communication, and elicit laughter from adults. We follow children’s laughter from spontaneous expressions and verbalizations of good mood (a phenomenon that Korney Chukovsky referred to as "ekikiki"), through nonsensical jokes, various forms of phonetic and semantic distortions and inversions, euphonic wordplay and witticisms, to the children’s joke proper. We aim to demonstrate how a specific orally transmitted, laughter-generating literary complex takes shape, composed of particular genres and stylistic forms, as well as how, in parallel, a humorous social community emerges among preschool children. On the other hand, preschool children, through their naive way of thinking, the establishment of unusual and unexpected symbolic relationships, and their lack of understanding of adult social relations, often amuse adults. This phenomenon of the "child’s mouth" finds its expression in oral genres (such as jokes), but also in types of narrative subjects and focalizers in written literature (poetry, short stories, and novels).