The Development of Humor

A response from chapter 3 of the reading 41-89 in Comic Relief

This chapter of Comic Relief  by John Morreal is about the evolution of humor. He starts with how humans and apes share many similarities regarding amusement and humor. Being a Biology major, I discuss and study every aspect of the Theory of Evolution, so I figured I would focus on a part of this chapter that was a little different than my norm. For me, the four stages of development of humor provided the most interest. These 4 stages were distinguished by Paul McGhee, and he basically splits up major changes in what children think are funny.

The first stage, called “Incongruous Actions toward Objects,” is when a child does inappropriate things with objects. Morreal references Jean Piaget’s story about his daughter pretended to eat non edible things when she was 18 months old. I was instantly relieved to read that I was not the only one who did this as a child. I don’t vividly remember it, but my mom always tells my friends that I used to jokingly take bites out of my vast collection of TY Beanie Baby stuffed animals. According to her, obnoxious exclamations of  “mmmmmm” and “yummy” always accompanied my furry meals.  

As I kept reading about each stage of development of humor in children, I continued to make connections between what Morreal explained and what I grew up around with younger siblings, cousins, and neighbors. The “Conceptual Incongruity” stage is probably the one I’m most familiar with. This is the third stage and is defined by when children have developed concepts for mom, dad, cat, pig, etc., and can “violate those concepts” for entertainment. I couldn’t count how many time a little 3 or 4 year old cousin came up to me at a family Christmas party and screamed “moooooooo” or “oink” and immediately fell into hysteria. These animal noises always seemed to make them laugh, but my hilarious jokes about sports or school didn’t really resonate with them, much to my dismay.

 Eventually, my young cousins started growing up, and there humor also matured greatly. Instead of laughing at their awkward attempts to scare me with animal noises, I began to enjoy their clever stories about elementary school romance. Because of these connections, this section of the chapter was really easy for me to relate to. I was constantly reading an example of a child’s humorous behavior and thinking, “I remember when Meg was 3 and did those same things.” This sort of brought a sense of nostalgia to me, and that’s why I felt inclined to blog about this reading in particular.