My five-year-old boy has the dubious honour of being fed at meal times. However, something unusual happened.
He: I finished eating by myself!
I: 你很独立。 (Thought fleetingly of the word “independent” but decided to use Chinese with him instead.)
He: 什么意思？ (What does it mean?)
I: 能自己来。 (Can do it by yourself)
Without any hesitation, he stretched out his hand and shouted “自己来啦”, adeptly using the Singaporean particle, lar, that reaches into the deep recesses of Singaporean souls and generally exhibiting an adorable demeanour. His swift comeback took me by such surprise that I burst out laughing from my belly.
He is a true blue Singaporean!
Children and their unexpected antics have the impact of making jaded adults revert to their less hardened selves and emit hearty laughter.
My daughter's become obsessed with trying to make people laugh. She's quite a bit funnier when she's not trying, though.
ime being funny requires an awkward period of obvious intent to learn how to hide intent and the impact of intent - and to deepen intuition about humor.
When I was grocery bagger, in addition to bagging, I had to talk people into letting me take their groceries to their car. It was boring and my mind needs a task, so I'd play a game where I tried to make each of them laugh. In the end what I learned is that humor largely comes from consistently exploring something deeply. Everything beyond what's assumed is surprising (often benignly threatening) and incongruent merely at a factual level which is 9/10s of humor. The other 10th is emphasis/delivery if I'm not missing other things.
@k00b learning to humor
https://m.stacker.news/42035
Trust you to turn it into an explicit Science
Damn I thought I’m the only one who tried to analyse humor
That’s what people told me in school. I might never mentally recovered from this.
It’s hard to not try to be funny when you like to make people laugh.
Maybe it’s an expectation thing: I shouldn’t hope that they laugh but just say stuff because I think it’s funny 🤔
FWIW, I think you're funny when you're trying to be funny.
That’s funny
Dammit! I wasn't trying to be.
lol, I think you try hard at everything you do
Do you ever humour her by fake laughing?
No. She gets enough genuine laughs that I don't feel the need.
My daughter makes me laugh every single day. She is a real character, which can also make her a bit of a handful, but she is always make my wife and I laugh.
I hope she doesn’t lose the spunk n mad-cap research skills
When he was less than 5, I took delight in subjecting my lil brother to a
torturegame consisting on grabbing him by the arm or the leg, and asking him if he wanted me to let him go, but with the following rule: "yes" meant "no", and "no" meant "no", and he could only answer by saying either "yes" or "no". He would then desperately come up with as many combinations as he could, in vane of course, for there's no way out, right? ...one day, the little daemon came up with a hack that followed the rules, and I had to let him go while my brain crashed in a logic loop. I could not register what his answer was.So smart of him to figure out the loophole. Goes to show how we can never underestimate anyone
Neither over-estimate ourselves... never again... that little bart simpson..
Great! You have a super kid.
Yes, I do. Thanks for reading.
My boy is also five years old. I have very similar experiences with him.
Five is a precocious age!