I pretend to pick it all off my face and start chewing it again.
), cleaning it off the different parts of our faces (Oh no, its in your ear!
Ewwwww!!).
And it just doesnt seem to get old.
The 2 year-olds dont find it remotely interesting (What the heck is Devon doing?
The 4 year-olds favorite seems to be when I get my name wrong).
But, Ill tell you, its a homerun with the 3 year-olds.
Check out this article from Washington Post Magazine,The Peekaboo Paradox.
Its their first joke.
They are reacting to a sequence of events that begins with the presence of a familiar, comforting face.
When the face suddenly reappears, everything is orderly in the babys world again.
Anxiety is banished, and the baby reacts with her very first laugh.
At its heart, laughter is a tool to triumph over fear.
We need it, because life is scary.
Nature is heartless, people can be cruel, and death and suffering are inevitable and arbitrary.
We learn to tame our terror by laughing at the absurdity of it all.
Any joke, any amusing observation, can be deconstructed to fit.
The seemingly benign Henny Youngman one-liner, Take my wife .
relies in its heart on an understanding that love can become a straitjacket.
By laughing at that recognition, you are rising above it, and blunting its power to disturb.
After the peekaboo age, but before the age of such sophisticated understanding, dwells the preschooler.
His sense of humor is more than infantile but less than truly perceptive.
He comprehends irony but not sarcasm.
He lacks knowledge but not feeling.
The central fact of his world and the central terror to be overcome is his own powerlessness.
Humor obviously plays a large role in early childhood education.
When you are around children all the time, you have an unspoken understanding of what is funny.
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