Children's Understanding of Jokes

Listening to grownups, children hear many things which they do not understand. Sometimes they feel puzzled; they have a vague awareness of something beyond their grasp. Often they put their own construction on what they have heard, not realizing till much later that they have not understood correctly.

Few things, I think, evoke so convincingly the atmosphere of our own childhood, so strange but not entirely beyond recapturing, as the recollection of our childhood misunderstandings. When I was a child, I used to hear a maid of European origin talk about the "old country." I imagined that this was a country that existed before I was born and that had now ceased to exist; it was something the grownups knew about that I could never know. Recently I heard about a little boy who had been told something about genetics and who later remarked wonderingly: "You know, they say I'm the way I am because of my blue jeans." In their solitary reading, children often attach their own meanings to words; this is facilitated by their also not knowing the correct pronunciation. So a friend of mine used to think that "sundry" meant "dried by the sun." She had first come across it in the National Geographic—some such phrase as "various and sundry places," and the word had called up images of luminous, parched deserts.

Here is the way two six-year-old boys have understood the term "double header," which they have picked up from the talk of older boys or of their fathers. Karl tells me that he has made up a joke: "Why did the moron go to the model shop to get a head to paste on the Dodgers stand?" (He explains, in answer to my question, that he means a model of a head.) He then gives the answer: "So they would have a double-header." Bob, overhearing this, asks somewhat patronizingly: "Do you know what a double-header is, Karly?" Karl replies: "A Dodger with two heads." Bob enlightens him: "No, two people who own the Dodgers. They're two people, so they have two heads." E