Marcus has a question: ‘What did Humpty Dumpty go?’ He also has the answer: ‘BONK, BONK!’
This question, asked and answered by a smiling four-year-old, is Marcus’s new joke. Marcus has only just learned about jokes; he discovered them when the adults were reading jokes from Christmas crackers a few weeks ago. Now he makes his own jokes whenever he can. He knows some of the rules about jokes. He knows that making a joke involves something funny, and that when they are told, people laugh.
When children discover jokes and make their own attempts at humour, it is for them as if theirs is the first joke ever told. They have made an important discovery. And the more children come to know, the better placed they are to play with the things they know and make humour.
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