Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/what-makes-young-children-laugh/5013446/
We laugh, according to Freud, because of a failure of expectation. What is funny about a joke, to illustrate, is the unexpectedness of the punch line. Consider a typical child riddle. Question: "Why did the tomato blush?" Answer: "Because she saw the salad dressing." What is funny about this riddle is the unexpected personification of the terms "salad" and "dressing."Young children, however, do not laugh at this riddle because their expectations depend, in part at least, on their level of intellectual development. Preschoolers do not yet have the intellectual facility to recognize that one and the same word can have different meanings. And it is the introduction of unexpected meanings that make riddles amusing to those who are able to appreciate them.
To understand what makes young children laugh, we have to understand their expectations regarding their physical and social worlds. That is to say, we have to have some idea of their concepts of space, time, and causality as well as of their developing sensory and motor abilities. We also have to be aware of their naive belief that adults are all-wise, all-knowing creatures. Awareness of the young child's conceptions of the world can inform us as to what they ...