Baby's First Joke

Actually, Isaac has been making jokes for a while now -- I think he's a very funny kid. To go a long way back, shortly after he learned to say hot he pretended that my breast was too hot while he was nursing -- he even held out his palm to it, cautiously, as if to test the temperature. And as my readers know, he's made many recent jokes about the dichotomy between yummy and yucky.

But this week he made two new jokes that made him laugh really hard, jokes that he has continued to tell over and over. I would suggest that these jokes, like much of the world's great humor*, address topics that were making him uncomfortable -- in this case, identity and separation.

The first joke was about our regular Kindergym instructor, who is called Teacher Alice. I knew that Isaac liked her -- after all, she sings The Wheels on the Bus and uses rubber stamps to put interesting pictures on his hands and belly -- but I was still surprised that Isaac was disappointed when we took a make-up class from Teacher Kelly instead.

A few days after that, as we played on our lawn, we were talking about the two Kindergym teachers. Isaac seemed to want to work out who his real teacher was. After we had been talking about the two women for a while, I asked Isaac who taught his gym class, and he answered, "Teacher Alice." After a pause he went on to say, "Teacher Kelly."

Then he reached into the grass and picked up a small apple that had fallen off a nearby tree. "Teacher Apple," he said. Then he repeated, clearly very pleased with himself, "Teacher Apple!" He laughed about Teacher Apple for the next five minutes. Whenever his giggles let up, he said, "Teacher Apple teach gym class! Sing 'round and round'!" Then he laughed all over again.

The second joke seemed to be about the dog, but was actually about me, I think. I only work one day a week, and although Isaac is happy to be with his dad on that day, from time to time he'll ask Craig, "Mama come home?" Last week I worked on Sunday, and as I put Isaac to bed that evening, he talked to himself for a while, saying things like, "Dad go work. Mama go work. Come back home." He repeated these types of statements for a while, perhaps reassuring himself that people always return home from work, while I listened and murmured the occasional assent. Then he said, "Dog go work." Pause. "Dog go work!"

I recognized a cue when I heard it. "Oh, does the dog go to work?" I asked.

Isaac screwed up his face in greatly exaggerated scorn and replied, "Nooooooooo!" This was clearly the punchline, because then he laughed heartily. Over the next 30 minutes, even after he was nearly asleep, he would suddenly say, "Dog go work. Noooo!" and laugh some more.

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*Of course I laugh along with him, although when I said "great humor" I didn't mean that these particular jokes were actually great. Although I'm pretty impressed with the Alice/apple pun!