Jokes

Babies do lots of funny things, and when they laugh, it is contagious.  None the less, I hadn't really expected that Helena Iara would be able to tell jokes, not until she came up with two in the last couple of days.

The first joke came as we were getting ready to leave to go to the playground.  Over the last couple of months, since we first came to the US, then went to Los Angeles, and are now back in Santa Fe, she has adopted the habit of taking toys with her wherever we go; it seems to be a way to feel secure in the face of so many moves, so many new places to sleep.  So a couple of days ago, she carried a doll over to me and said, "Take [it with us]."

"No," I said, "why not..."


Helena interrupted me with her stuffed duck, Pato, half as big as she is.  "Take."

"No," I said again, trying to push her to take one of her finger puppets, or maybe the little stuffed dog she calls Bow-Wow.

With a huge smile on her face, the ran over to her play kitchen, and said again, "Take!" She burst out laughing.

OK, it's not the deadpan delivery of classic comedy, but she was trying to be funny, and there was a certain ironic wit in the exchange.  Freud says that humor comes from the unexpected juxtaposition of concepts in the unconscious, and her inversion of what it was possible to take along seemed to work there.  She might not know the English phrase about "taking everything but the kitchen sink" on a trip, but if she did, the joke would have been even better.

She has also produced word-play that seems rather like a pun.  One of her favorite songs begins, "Cai cai, balão, cai cai balão..." (Fall fall balloon, fall fall balloon), which she adapted to be "Cai cai, Papai," (fall fall Daddy), which actually has a better rhyme to it than the original.  And then yesterday, as I was reading in my favorite chair (which has recently become one of the places she most likes to play), she changed it to "Sai sai, Papai," with the same melody and rhyme, but now meaning "leave leave, Daddy."

Does it make sense to call these exchanges jokes?  Or wit?  What is certain is that she has observed what she has done in the past to make us laugh, and now does it consciously, making the humor intentional.  Hegel sees this process of coming to be aware of oneself and one's influence on others and then consciously changing intentions based on that, as the essence of the move from the epic to the tragic to the comic in Greek theater.  Hrdy believes that the ability to seduce adults is almost hard-wired into babies, and that children's attempts to make us laugh (along with their extraordinary needs, which no one person can fulfill), lie at the basis of civilization.

I'm not sure I would go that far.  But as Helena learns to make us laugh, and makes this a part of who she is, I feel like something wonderful and important is happening.