Laughing Children and Funny Children: Laughter and Early Childhood

Abstract

Laughter is a significant part in the lives of children and youth. Statistically speaking, children laugh much more than adults. Our paper deals with preschool children’s laughter, the ways children laugh and make each other laugh in everyday communication, and the ways in which children of this age make adults laugh. We will look into children’s laughter, ranging from spontaneous expression and verbalization of good mood (a phenomenon that Korney Chukovsky refers to as “ekikiki”) through children’s nonsensical puns, various types of phonetic and semantic scrambling and distortion of words and phrases, euphonic games and puns to children’s jokes. We will try to show how children’s laughter-making oral literary complex (constituted of specific genres and stylistic forms) is expressed, and how this expression, mutatis mutandis, facilitates the formation of a social community of laughter of preschool children. On the other hand, preschool children, with their naïve thinking, establishment of unusual and unexpected symbolic relationships and misunderstanding of social relations between adults, often make adults laugh. This phenomenon of “children’s mouths” has its reflexes in oral genres (jokes) as well as in narrative subjects and focalizers in written literature (poetry, short story, novel).

narrative subject, childhood, laughter, community of laughter, children’s mouths