Tough (Nursery) Room

I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if I had a blog right from birth. Sure, the entries up to age fifteen would be brief because that’s when I learned to touch-type. But I had plenty of things to vent about. And I guess I owe it to my younger self to go back and belatedly complain.

Like, the jokes we tell kids. As a child, you often get exposed to jokes, particularly in riddle form, through books or other activities that are supposed to be fun. I think it’s about time that I speak up for kids and say, those jokes are crap. Well they were in the seventies anyway, maybe they’re better now.

Like, there was one joke: What do you get when you cross an owl with a goat? A hootenanny. I guess that’s funny, but the problem is that appreciating the joke requires knowing what a hootenanny is, or at the very least, knowing that it is a thing, and not just a random collection of sounds. Of course, as a four-year-old, my experience with free-form folk happenings was rather limited, so I had no idea what that word meant. So not only did I not find it funny, I misunderstood the whole idea of riddles for a while, assuming them to be some kind of bizarre random code rather than a form of humour.

Indeed, I just saw “What is a hootenanny?” Among a list of trivia questions, so it’s hardly a fair joke topic for a child.

But the ultimate bad joke for kids is, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Potentially, it’s a funny joke, but it relies on two things from its audience:

• They’ve heard a large number of jokes in the riddle format.
• They have a good appreciation of irony.

The problem is, children are the one group of people who don’t have either of these things, so it falls flat. The teller has to explain the joke, and as everyone knows, if you have to explain a joke it won’t be funny. But in this case it’s worse, because the kids won’t even understand it after you explain it.

It’s actually pretty surprising that the joke is still around: by the time you have the necessary mental faculties to understand it, it’s so old that you can’t appreciate it. Just think, probably no one in the western world has laughed at that joke in the last fifty years, and yet somehow, it’s still with us.

But this whole walk through bad-joke memories was triggered by something I saw in a store recently. It was a toddler’s sweater that a picture of crossed hockey sticks on it, with the words, “Ice Ice Baby.” That struck me as tremendously unfair to the child. To them, it’s just a reference to ice as a skating surface, and they have no way of knowing that they’re walking around with the title of a song on their chest — a song they may come to consider rather embarrassing, depending on their own musical direction.

Of course, the makers of the shirt are counting on appealing to the parents, many of whom today are of an age where they will recognize the joke and find the shirt funny. But that would be like if someone my age had been forced to wear a shirt with a humourous reference to a Pat Boone song. Thanks mom and dad, you’re using me as a pawn in pop-cultural struggles for your own amusement. I’ll make my own musical choices, thank you, right after I figure out this ‘irony’ thing.