Kid Stuff
One day when she was about two-years-old, my older daughter looked up from her plate at the dinner table, cleared her throat, and proclaimed, “No chair!” then burst out laughing. We looked around at each other confused. Then she blurted out again: “No table!” she squealed, looking straight at the table. Suddenly, it dawned on me what had just happened: My baby had just told her first joke.
Being the comedy nerd that I am, even simply recalling this story brings a tear to my eye, but it also reminds me how very beautiful—and simple—comedy is at its core. In those two word phrases, my daughter had distilled irony down to its very essence: something was clearly there, and she said it wasn’t.
The experience of being a mother provides numerous reminders that adults often overcomplicate things that are really quite simple. Relationships are about two people talking to, listening to, and doing things for each other. Play is about having fun. And humor is about the tension between the expected and the unexpected (or the release of that tension).
What I love about “no chair”, “no table”, is, well, so many things:
1. The starting point is an everyday, recognizable object. She didn’t pick something out-of-the-ordinary—“no giraffe”—or inherently funny—“no poop”. Chairs. Tables. The stuff of our daily hum-drum existence. The stuff we use to go about our boring little lives every boring little day. Those objects—they’re the basis of the best comedy.
2. The condition placed on the object is a negation. It’s not a colorful descriptor—“humungous chair”, “poopy chair”—it’s an existential definition. What you thought was—is not. Everything has been turned on its head.
3. The universality of the joke extends to any such object. Once she was tickled by the first joke, she extrapolated to other common objects, with—to her mind—the same uproarious results. It works with chair. Does it work with table? By God, it does! And it will work for plate, and fork, and crib, and maybe, if I’m really feeling ballsy and ready to push this envelope wide open, it could work for “blankie,” or “mom.”
A key factor in the humor of this joke is the concept of “object permanence,” the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. Children begin to gain this understanding around one year of age, but it usually takes between one and two years for it to fully sink in. That’s why Peek-a-Boo is so fun for a baby—he literally doesn’t know where you’ve gone, or if you’re coming back, until he sees you again. And when you come back, it’s like magic.
In fact, there’s a sense of the “comedian as magician” that my daughter’s joke conveys—the joke teller has the power to call things into being, or to deny things their existence regardless of the fact that they seem to exist right before our very eyes. It was a moment of empowerment, then, this first joke. It was a human being beginning to understand her creative capabilities, and I can’t think of a more beautiful way to come to that realization than with a laugh.
So what can we learn from this? Well, yes, the obvious thing would be “to think like a child.” But when I say that, I don’t mean it in that hokey “renew your sense of wonder at the universe” / ”chase a dragonfly through a sunflower field” sort of way. In fact, I mean the very opposite. Rather than finding that place of childhood wonder and awe, remember that time when you first realized you were an agent in this vast and incomprehensible, awe-inspiring universe; that you could make things happen, call things into being, and, yes, make people laugh. And when you remember that time, remember how simple it really was, and turn to that grown-up improviser in your head—you know, the one who likes to say things like “but is that the right thing to do now?” and “will that be funny enough?”—and tell him to stop acting like such an uptight grown-up and think more like a kid discovering her first joke.
You’ll get it right. I promise.
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