Again, humor is a form of play intellectual play, or play with ideas. While humor generally involves playing with what has already been learned (as we shall see below), children also build new cognitive skills and learn a tremendous amount about their world while engaged in mental play. This knowledge and set of skills will support their performance in school and in all other intellectual endeavors throughout childhood.
Since humor is really symbolic play, and language is our main vehicle for thought, it comes as no surprise that children love to play with words. They first play with the sounds of words, and then with meanings. The discovery that the same word can have two meanings around the time they enter kindergarten or first grade is an exciting one, and spurs them on to find even more words to play with. This excitement fuels the desire to trade jokes and riddles, and to read riddle books, as well as other funny books, cartoons, etc.
In the process of seeking out and sharing humor, the child's budding vocabulary is rapidly enlarged. The desire to learn new riddles and jokes at the end of the preschool years exposes the child to new words, and the repeated telling of them to friends consolidates the memory of those words. It also makes these words more readily available in the service of everyday writing and conversations.
Humor in stories stimulates preschoolers' desire to read the words that tell the funny story. Many TV programs for preschoolers (such as Sesame Street and Between the Lions) use humor very successfully to help keep children focused on the letter and word combinations presented. Learning to recognize letters and words is always fun for preschoolers, but adding humor to the processes makes it even more fun.
By the time children enter first grade, in addition to the joy of telling each other riddles and jokes, children love to read riddles. Riddle books are consistently among the best selling children's books. The best way for young children to build reading skills is to simply spend a great deal of time reading. Since riddle books are read over and over again by children, this gives them the practice they need to improve their reading skills. Most importantly, the skills that are improved while reading riddles generalize to everything else the child reads, thereby improving performance in school. In many children, the love of reading riddles creates a stronger desire to read other kinds of books, as well. While this benefit does not apply to the pre-k classroom, the nurturing of other forms of humor during the preschool years helps assure children will extend their love of humor to reading riddles when the time comes.
Among preschool children, it is well established that a tremendous amount of general learning takes place while playing. Many preschool curricula are built entirely around play. The learning that occurs through verbal humor (remember, it is mental play) is just as powerful, and occurs in two basic ways. The first involves a solidifying or consolidating of what is already known. Most children's humor distorts some part of the known world. The humor cannot be understood unless this incongruity or distortion is realized. Whenever any aspect of the child's knowledge is violated, and there are clear indications (e.g., its occurrence in the context of play and later of a cartoon, joke or riddle) that this distortion is just for fun, the laughter signals a confirmation of the child's understanding of the world. It's as if the child is saying, "That's absurd, I know that's impossible." In older children a second source of general intellectual gains lies in the background information present in all riddles and jokes. Any riddle involves a complex set of ideas that lead to the ultimate punch line. Reading the riddle allows the child to learn this new information. And since kids love to read riddles over and over, each rereading allows for a gradual assimilation of parts of the riddle that were not fully understood the first time.
There has been research since the 1950s documenting a close relationship between creativity and humor. This is not surprising, since both involve seeing the world in new and unusual ways. Both require you to abandon your usual way of understanding or looking at things, and consider them from a totally new perspective.
Children who get turned on to humor, then, accumulate a tremendous amount of experience with the general notion of thinking about the world from unusual vantage points. This strengthens a general ability to think in innovative ways. In other words, humor nurtures the child's capacity for divergent (vs. convergent) thinking the key form of thought required for innovative problem solving.