Children's Joke Observations

Children’s Jokes My observations on this activity included three children from the same family: Bella, a three-year-old girl, Korbyn, an eight-year-old boy, and Hy’Cei, an eleven-year-old girl. The observations were done individually to avoid distractions or influences and together to compare the differences. The children were interviewed on Halloween a couple of hours before they went out to trick-or-treat. They were promised candy as a motivator to participate since they were ready to go out and collect more.

Bella was first to go and we conversed a little before getting to question her for a joke. She was able to spell her name, tell me her age, favorite color (“black”), and her favorite food (“chicken dou-dou”). After having her fully

He is in the third grade, his favorite color is black, and he loves pizza. Since he was a bit older I began by asking about the things that he found to be funny. He said that he was not a jokester and that most of them were at school. I proceeded to ask him to tell me a joke, he said, “ Knock-knock,” so I followed with, “who is there?” He quickly blurted, “Johnny Appleseed!” He thought it was funny and fell back on his seat and even began to roll a little, since he did not complete the joke correctly, I asked him for another. His other jokes were very similar, he either did not properly execute them or did not finish, but the end result was the same, he would find them to be funny and would throw himself around. I then asked him if he could tell me some funny stories from school and the stories that he described all involved someone falling or hurting themselves. “My friend at school was running and he fell, ha-ha, he went POW!” He ended by asking me to tell him a joke, but he was not very assumed at my joke about his costume. I then asked him if his costume gave him any special powers and he gave me a very dumbfounded look, as if saying, “are you kidding?” In my opinion, Korbyn appeared to be barely entering the concrete operational stage as his jokes demonstrated egocentrism when considering humor. They were mainly focused on what he thought was funny regardless of the context or my reaction. However, he did demonstrate transitive inference when he realized my joke was more of an attempt to harmlessly make fun of him (Berger, 2014, p.