Some elements in a child's ability to understand and participate in the convention of a punning joke

are studied in a group of fifty-five children aged from six to seventeen. While comprehension of the joking situation has a definite relation to age, intelligence, and freedom of the learning process, the acquisition seems a particularly unstable one. It varies in a single child with his ability to withstand strong feelings aroused by the latent meaning of sometimes purely incidental elements in the joke. For example a joke about morons upset the child's ability to respond by punning, or even to understand what was demanded of him, because of castration anxiety. Some children become expert in the use of jokes to control the environment and deal with the problem of hostility. Others find it intolerable for the adult to abandon his role as supporter of the reality principle by propounding jokes.