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Verbal jokes, as Freud has shown, are extraordinarily complicated productions, in which a variety of psychic functions collaborate, and in which the result is very compact and condensed. The capacity to comprehend and produce verbal jokes develops through various stages. The kinds of verbal jokes that children make, enjoy, learn, and repeat, change with age. It is the purpose of this paper to analyze one phase in children's response to verbal jokes.1
In asking children between the ages of six and twelve to tell me jokes they knew, I found that, in telling jokes which contained a play on words, they frequently ignored the double meaning. They acknowledged only one meaning of the ambiguous term. The following questions then arose. How did they enjoy the joke without the wordplay? What is the alternative way of enjoying the joke with the wordplay, as adults presumably do? Why does the child not respond in this way?
I shall confine myself here to instances in which children did not use the double meaning provided by the joke. This does not imply that the same children did not in other instances utilize double meanings. To determine where children are first able to use double meanings and where they adhere longest to single meanings would go beyond the scope of the present paper. I am not able to set any age limit to the phenomenon I am considering. Children throughout the age range from six through twelve provided instances of single-meaning reactions. I assume that utilizing both meanings represents a more advanced stage of intellectual and emotional development. As adults, we are inclined to assume that in certain jokes where a term admits of a double meaning this double meaning is essential to the effectiveness of the joke. As Freud has remarked, if in such cases other words were substituted we should no longer regard it as a joke.