Lord of the zings

My son got his hands on a joke book a few weeks ago and read it from cover to cover. He read every joke aloud to me, then explained his reasoning about why it was supposed to be funny. He mispronounced lots of words, some because he’d never heard them and others because he had read them but never spoken them, or knew them but had never seen them in print. I would gently correct him; he would repeat the joke with the correct pronunciation. I would groan. Repeat.

“What does a rabbit like to eat for dessert? A hopsicle. Get it? Hopsicle?”

“I get it.”

“It’s like a popsicle, but it’s with hop.”

“Got it.”

“Because rabbits hop. Hopsicle.”

“Mm-hm.”

I’ll admit that the joke-telling process was much funnier to me with these gratuitous explanations — they functioned like anti-humor, the joke being the arduousness of explaining a simple joke.

But this is also what practice looks like — following a model closely and repeating it, noticing the way that it functions, internalizing rules both explicit and intuitive. The hardest “rule” of joke-telling of this sort (the riddle variety) for my son to master was to not repeat a word in the set-up that you’re going to use in the punchline. So instead of saying “What’s a rabbit’s favorite kind of popsicle,” you’d say “what’s a rabbit’s favorite kind of dessert?”

While he repeated jokes and internalized the structure, rules, and conventions, he also learned a lot of content. He learned the pronunciation of names he had never heard, since so many knock-knock jokes make puns out of names. He learned the pronunciation of countries he may or may not have heard of: “Kenya stop telling so many knock knock jokes?”

He learned a lot about cars (there was a section of “travel jokes”). I had to explain to him what the word “cannibal” means, and why he might not want to repeat that one.

This whole process took about four hours across two days. It was alternately excruciating and amusing for me, but my son, to all appearances, had a blast the whole time.

You don’t learn anything without practicing it, and practicing takes time. What we choose to learn and how we choose to practice has an enormous impact on the learning process as a whole. Overall, I think the 4 hours was time well spent. He made up his best joke yet the other day. We have been reading Lord of the Rings together, and he came up with this one at breakfast:

“What do you say when Strider leaves?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“You say he’s Ara-gone!”

Once you have even the outlines of a map in your head, you can fill in the details or chart your own territory. You can explore, you can play. But without the map, it’s possible you’ll just be lost. Which maps we have access to (and when) can have huge implications. I’m reminded of one of my favorite Onion headlines: “97-Year-Old Dies Unaware of Being Violin Prodigy.”

One thing I’ve struggled with this week as virtual school begins is the steep learning curve toward a particular kind of mental map — the operation and navigation of technology — whose development often precludes the introduction of other maps that might be more important for young children, or at least seem more important to me.

I can only wonder when my son will think up his first Zoom joke.