Why Are Kids So Funny?

My daughter, Alice, is almost two, and quite funny. Although she can say short sentences—“I need cake!”—her humor isn’t particularly verbal. Instead, she giggles while stumbling around in grownup shoes, or blows bubbles in her water when she should be drinking it. She likes to put on a hat, pull it down over her eyes, and then blunder around, arms outstretched, like a mummy. She’s also discovered the humor of exaggeration: recently, when her brother resisted getting out of his pajamas in the morning, she sidled up, grabbed his shirt, hauled on it with both hands, and laughed while yelling, “Ooooouuuut!”

The Early Humor Survey, a roadmap to the emergence of little-kid humor between the first and forty-seventh months, took a team of psychologists about a decade to develop. According to the survey, Alice is right on track. Babies often wait a month or two to smile, and a couple more to start laughing (although, as with all human things, there’s a lot of variability). But once humor gets going, it achieves what A.I. researchers might call a “fast takeoff.” In her fourth month, Alice discovered “hide and reveal games” (like peekaboo); she then moved quickly into tickling, funny faces, and “bodily humor” (“e.g., head through legs”). “Strange actions with objects” soon followed (“e.g., use wrong end of spoon, put cup on head”), and then teasing (offering us toys and mischievously snatching them away). That’s now given way to “acting like something else” (a moaning spoon monster, dripping applesauce or yogurt). The survey predicts that, in the months ahead, she’ll discover the joy of nonsense words (“e.g., schmoogly”); it’ll be a couple more years, though, before she appreciates pun-based jokes.

Because I’m not particularly funny, I’ve always envied funny people. As a teen-ager, I admired my friends Kevin and Win, who were constantly cracking jokes. If you were around those guys, you laughed. That’s not true about me, and so I wasn’t expecting to have funny kids. I didn’t know that, broadly speaking, all kids are comedians, or that humor is among the first aspects of personality to emerge in children. In fact, babies begin making jokes before they can use words, and it’s possible for a little kid’s life to be saturated with humor, year after year. My seven-year-old son, Peter, often begins and ends the day by proposing a contest: “Let’s see who can make the other person laugh first.”

At some point, of course, adulthood sets in. But grownup life, while serious, is also filled with laughter. It’s true that we don’t tend to laugh much when we’re alone, and that, as adults, many of us spend a fair amount of time that way. But, in a series of observational studies, the psychologist Robert Provine found that laughter occurs more frequently in groups—thirty times as often as when we’re alone. About twenty per cent of the time, we laugh at proper jokes. Much more often, we laugh while we talk, buoying our own innocuous comments—“Look, it’s Andre”; “It was nice meeting you, too”—and eliciting laughter in return.

Other animals laugh, especially primates. In one account, advanced by the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, the laugh emerged as an auditory version of social grooming, an act that binds primate groups together. (“The time available for social grooming is limited,” Dunbar observes, “and this imposes an upper limit on the size of the group that can be bonded”; standup is more efficient.) “Laughter is one of humanity’s most ‘animalistic’ expressions,” the researchers Elisabetta Palagi, Fausto Caruana, and Frans de Waal wrote, a few years ago. “We go crazy. We become limp, lean on each other, turn red and shed tears. . . . We literally pee in our pants!” Yet “other hominids do not laugh as loudly and as often as humans,” the researchers write, and they do it “under a more limited range of circumstances.” Psychologists distinguish between involuntary laughter, as when you laugh at a joke, and voluntary laughter, which has a communicative quality. We use voluntary laughter to signify or express “nervousness, a need to please, reassurance of anxious others, a welcoming attitude, amusement, attraction to others, embarrassment,” and more.

The river of laughter in which we swim begins in infancy; it springs up simultaneously with the river of thought. Aristotle thought that human beings were distinctive because they were rational; Wittgenstein believed it was language that made us special; Sartre argued that our humanity flowed from the exercise of our wills. But the speed with which children embrace humor suggests that it, too, is fundamental to human nature. We laugh, therefore we are.

Much of the work behind the Early Humor Survey was led by Elena Hoicka, a psychologist at the University of Bristol’s School of Education. Humor among adults has often been studied, she told me; humor among kids less so. “It’s really hard to study in young children,” she said. Most little kids don’t joke on command; they’re shy, and funnier around their parents than other people. Since they’re still learning to talk, sometimes only their families understand them. “You have to turn everything into, like, a game,” Hoicka explained, “and even then kids might not want to play.” These practical difficulties are one reason that kid humor is a relatively small field in psychology. There’s also, she thinks, some academic prejudice against the study of humor— “a bit of a perception that, if it’s a lighthearted thing, then it must not be serious research.”

“What is its purpose?” Hoicka asked, of humor in kids. She pointed to research she’d conducted with another psychologist, Burcu Soy Telli, which showed that “humor development predicted socio-cognitive development six months later, but not the other way around.” Joking around, in other words, helps kids learn to think about what other people are thinking. To get a joke, Hoicka said, “you have to read intentions,” merging them with what you know about the world; to find it funny when your mom puts a cup on her head, you first have to understand what a cup is for, and then to ask yourself what she might be thinking when she uses it the wrong way. “You also have to read their emotional expressions,” Hoicka went on. “You have to understand their knowledge, their beliefs.” Perhaps, as you become more engaged, you learn faster. Rana Esseily, a French psychologist, led a study in which grownups showed eighteen-month-old toddlers how to use a grabber to retrieve a toy. When they demonstrated the tool in a humorous way—by using it to retrieve the toy, then throwing the toy on the ground for no reason and laughing—more toddlers learned how to use it. (Reading the study, I thought of how even college professors joke around with their students, and of how people love getting their news in comedic form.)

Psychologists have long studied how children develop theory of mind—an intuitive understanding of what other people know, think, and feel. The experimental setups involved in that research are often dry: a small child might watch as a candy bar is moved from one drawer to another, then be asked where someone who left the room beforehand will look for the candy when they return. It’s possible that, in real life, jokes teach many of these lessons. Because “humor is emotionally positive the vast majority of the time, and usually social,” Hoicka said, we want to keep learning; the comedic context creates a kind of mental playground or gym, and we never want to leave.

Parents and kids smile more when they’re joking around, and toddlers talk more (even if it’s nonsense). Jokes encourage imaginative rule-breaking (what if this banana were a phone?) and the exploration of new terrain (if your child knows that dogs go “woof” and cats go “meow,” you might tell her that fish go “blub” and cars go “vroom”). One way to think of kid humor, Hoicka told me, is as a form of “early creativity,” or a path into it. Another one of her projects, the Early Pretending Survey, tracks how kids progress from “pretending to be in another state” (sleeping, say), during their first year, to “acting out completely made-up fantasy scenarios, e.g., inventing a pegasus man who flies through space,” at age three; pretending, she said, is in some ways a more serious, rule-based extension of humor. She’s now working on an Early Deception Survey, too. Deception “involves even more layers of understanding, including keeping things a bit of a secret,” she said. Mental life builds on mental life, feeding back into itself; the social joy of humor helps keep us in the loop.

“How Funny Is ChatGPT?,” Drew Gorenz and Norbert Schwarz, two psychology researchers at the University of Southern California, asked, in 2024. They tasked the chatbot with generating satirical news headlines in the style of the Onion, then asked people to rate them alongside actual headlines drawn from that publication. At least by this measure, ChatGPT’s “humor production abilities” were prodigious. Participants thought the A.I.-generated headlines were as good as the human-written ones. The top-rated headline—“Local Man Discovers New Emotion, Still Can’t Describe It Properly”—was the product of ChatGPT. At the time, the chatbot was powered by GPT-3.5; today, it employs GPT-5. “If GPT 3.5 is like a skyscraper, GPT-5 is more like a city,” the newest version said, when I asked it to explain the difference.

A.I. research is often conducted this way, by means of tests and benchmarks, with human and automated outputs compared. But can you benchmark humor? “We regard it, above all, as a living thing,” the philosopher Henri Bergson wrote, in his essay “Laughter,” from 1900. “However trivial it may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life.” Laughter, he argued, is a form of intelligence which “must always remain in touch with other intelligences. . . . Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. . . . However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.”