Homework?
She has since been determined to learn the how to’s of telling a good one. My husband thinks this can be accomplished by teaching her endless Knock-Knock jokes; I think she would benefit more from eliminating them. (I would benefit from that too, but that’s a whole different story). Of course, my daughter thinks Knock-Knock jokes are fantastic; she repeats them again and again; she’ll omit the punch line and then wonders why I don’t laugh.
My son’s preschool teacher gave her daughter a pretty witty comeback the other day; the daughter responded with hands on the hips and a sneer. “I don’t find that amusing at all,” she said. Her daughter is 12. Ah, a teenager. She broke one of the cardinal rules of humor: ‘A Joke Told by Your Mother is Always Funny’. The other one is: don’t laugh when people get hurt, although I have to admit, I break that one sometimes. I know; that’s a bad habit and I’m working on it. My children need me to, because they believe nothing more funny than falling and tripping; we regularly hear our son crash, followed by my daughter’s comment: “Hilarious! Do it again”!
Personally, my biggest source of laughs is telling my kids things that aren’t true and seeing if they believe me or not. Usually, they do. When my daughter’s behavior took a particularly nasty turn one day, I told her I was taking her back to the zoo to trade her for a different monkey. “You can’t do that”! She yelled. “Of course I can. Your father still has the receipt,” I said. While my husband was busy searching his pockets for said receipt, she ran upstairs, all the while complaining about us and our idiotic plans. She was never, ever going to the zoo again, she said, and she certainly wasn’t getting in the car.
Later that day, when we heard some noise coming from her room, my husband went to spy. “She’s marching”, he declared when he came back downstairs. “Marching”? “Yes, marching. And chanting”, he added. I went to take a look for myself, this I had to see. My daughter was walking back and forth in her room, while declaring: “They Will Not Take Me Back to the Zoo”. Later, she admitted knowing full well that we didn’t purchase her at Henry Doorly; she was, after all, born in a Louisiana swamp (Jefferson Hospital, in Metairie, actually, but who’s keeping track). The Henry Doorly Zoo is nowhere near Louisiana; everybody knows that.
In case anybody thinks we are mean spirited to treat our children this way: we are merely continuing a family tradition. When I was little, my uncle explained his abnormally large Adam’s apple by saying he had been a chicken in a former life. For years, I believed him. I also believed my older siblings when they told me there were actual Gnomes in the forests around our town. I spent many a Sunday afternoon walk looking behind every tree and shrub, only to be told: “you just missed them”. I don’t think there is anything wrong with fooling young children a little; this is, after all, the age at which everything is still possible, and nothing seems too weird or too farfetched. It is when we get older that we become too cynical to imagine anything outside of the norm. Now that is anything but funny.
For more info on teaching children a sense of humor, try suite 101, Pep-Web, Michael Price, Surf Net, or Laughter Remedy
Comments