The joke

We've known for ages that Anya has a sense of humour--she laughs and shrieks with delight all the time, and first cracked up when she was about four months old.

But she's done a couple of things the past few days that look like rudimentary jokes. I honestly can't tell if they are or if I'm just reading too much into them; I'd be interested in the insights of psychologists about when joke-making develops.

Anyway, the jokes. Don't worry if you don't laugh out loud: it's more the manner in which they were done that was joke-like. She makes us laugh for real all the time just by clowning around.

1: On Saturday I was putting her to bed and we were looking at one of her favourite books, which involves a procession of a baby, a duck, a mummy-like woman, a dog, a girl on a horse, a boy on a bike etc., all heading to the seaside. Since many of these are things for which she knows the words, we often point to the baby, or dog, or mummy, and repeat their names in Anyaish.

Well, this time she did that, but she was getting it all wrong: she pointed to the mummy, and said "buh-bee". Then grinned at me with a twinkle in her eye. Then she pointed to the baby, and said "hah-hah-hah" for dog, and grinned at me again. Now I can't swear that she wasn't just getting confused--and she might have been looking at me for guidance about whether she was getting it right or wrong. But she knows these words well and uses them correctly, ooh, a couple of dozen times a day. It certainly seemed that there was something deliberate, and smile-worthy, about the error.

2: We bought her some 'crayon rocks' at the weekend. These are little pebble-shaped crayons that are easy to hold in a toddler's hand and scribble with. They also, frankly, look a bit like sweeties. So Kate was sitting with her on Sunday playing and scribbling, and Anya took one of them and held it near her mouth. She then made the mock nibbling gesture that we make when we're pretening to eat up her feet, or eat her food, and said 'nyum-nyum-nyummy' with that same twinkle in her eye. What she didn't do is what she normally does with things she wants to eat: stick it in her mouth and start chewing.

Obviously I might be reading way too much into these two incidents, but they certainly resemble one classic definition of a joke: a knowing reference to something that both parties know to be untrue, impossible, or nonsensical. And she's seen plenty of examples of jokes so far: the mock tummy-biting that has been cracking her up for the past nine months depends on the idea that her parent is simultaneously loving and gentle, while also behaving a bit like a savage tummy-biting beast.

Still, it's one thing to imitate that playful behaviour; quite another to extract from it a sort of theory of humour and apply it in a different context, as she seemed to be doing with the book and the crayons. Indeed, that definition of a joke seems to me to depend on the child having a theory of mind, which she isn't likely to develop for another couple of years.

I'm inclined to think she has started telling jokes, since I'm a proud dad who values humour highly. For the same reasons, you should probably treat me as an unreliable witness.