It's Hilarious

Last night, I attended a community "open mic" event in which our neighbors took turns showing off their talents. I was there at the invitation of my friend Bill, an older man who lost his wife a little over three years ago. In fact, the first words I ever spoke to him were in consolation for his loss. He was going to read some poetry he had written during the intervening interval, although he appended that information by saying, "I think you'll be surprised."

We show up for our friends, even if they're going to read their mournful poetry of loss. And besides, I told myself, he had been a professional writer, a newspaper journalist, so I went hoping for a nice surprise, although a part of me was on pins and needles, worried that I wouldn't be able to sufficiently hide my cringe response.

He was announced by the emcee and came to the mic dressed in black. He began by telling us a little about his journey over the past three years, saying that his wife had specified that she was to be cremated and her ashes scattered in a beautiful place to which she had never been. 

"So," he said, "I scattered them around the kitchen."

There was a pause, then the audience erupted in wild laughter.

As a joke, it was, frankly, hackneyed, even potentially sexist (although she'd been a successful novelist, so it's quite possible she didn't have time for cooking), but the delivery, the set up, the surprise, made it hilarious. He went on to do a full on comedy set centered around his experience as a recent widower.

"Peek-a-boo" is classic, nearly universal game we play with babies. 

We cover our eyes with our hands, wait a moment, then drop our hands to say, with a smile, "peek-a-boo." 

We do it because most babies find it hilarious. Yes, some may startle at first, even cry from the surprise, but once they "get" the game it never fails to delight.

Science reporter David Toomey writes in his terrific book Kingdom of Play, "There is a pleasure in the momentary disorientation of being tricked, or perhaps more precisely, a pleasure in learning that one has been tricked, that one has been, in a word, 'played'."

When we observe young children at play, there is generally a lot of laughter. Studies find that young children laugh something like 300 times a day while a typical adult might make it to 20.  Part of the reason, I'm guessing is this peek-a-boo response. Yes, we seem to take pleasure in being tricked: four and five year olds almost always laugh when I use slight-of-hand to pull a penny from their ears. And being tricked is the slightly gentler cousin of being surprised. Of course, it's possible to take things too far, as chronic practical jokers eventually discover, but most of the time, once our hearts have slowed down, we laugh. 

A big part of the reason children are compelled to play is the prospect of being tricked or delightfully surprised. Indeed, some theorists believe that play is natural selection's way to prepare us for the unexpected.

Our babies genuinely don't expect our face to appear. When it does it surprises and delights them, often even more so as we do it again and again. The open mic audience expected five minutes of melancholy, but were surprised with jokes. The children expect to see a penny in my hand, not their ear. I expect that young children laugh 95 percent more often than adults because they live much more in a world of the unexpected. As adults, we've seen more and so have gotten good at predicting, or, as if often the case, good at missing the surprise because we assume we've seen it all.

For young children, even discovering such fundamental things as object permanence, is delightfully surprising. When faced with the unexpected, when playfully surprised or tricked, we learn the value of staying on our toes, remaining flexible, and never being too certain. Indeed, looked at one way, whenever we learn something new our sense of the status quo is shaken and something new and unexpected has emerged to take its place . . . And play teaches us that it's hilarious.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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