Hey, Raising Humans Crew!
A four-year-old thinks it's hilarious to call a shoe a hat.
An eight-year-old will tell you the same riddle four times in a row and laugh harder each time.
An eleven-year-old rolls their eyes at a joke that would have sent them into hysterics three years ago, then turns around and makes a joke of their own that actually lands.
None of that is random. Humor develops in stages, and those stages track cognitive growth almost as reliably as vocabulary or motor skills do. What your child finds funny right now is a window into how they are learning to think, notice patterns, and read other people.
This week, a look at what's actually happening behind the giggles, the groan-worthy puns, and the jokes that only make sense to a kid.
Also in this edition:
THE FOUR AGES OF FUNNY: how humor shifts from physical surprise to wordplay to irony, and what each stage says about brain development.
WHY RIDDLES TAKE OVER THE ELEMENTARY YEARS: the linguistic leap that makes puns suddenly irresistible, and the surprising research on why older kids "get" more jokes but claim to enjoy them less.
THE SARCASM MILESTONE: why your child might not catch that you're kidding, and what that has to do with how their brain reads other people's minds.
🧠 THE THINK TANK: Cast your vote in this week’s poll!
The Four Ages of Funny
Long before your child tells their first real joke, they are already testing out humor.
Developmental psychologist Paul McGhee mapped this out decades ago, describing stages of humor that unfold in a predictable sequence from infancy through the tween years, each one tied to a new cognitive skill coming online.
Around age one, humor is almost entirely physical and social. Peekaboo and the surprise of a familiar person acting unfamiliar get real laughs, because at this stage humor is about shared attention with a trusted person, not concepts. Soon after, something shifts.
Once a child can hold a symbol in mind (a bowl can "be" a hat, a toy rabbit can "be" a monkey), incongruity itself becomes funny. That's the stage behind your toddler insisting a shoe belongs on their hands and cracking up every time they say it.
A study out of Turkiye tested this directly, showing 101 children ages two to eleven watching video scenes built to match each of McGhee's stages and recording their laughter.
Five-year-olds laughed hardest at the earlier stages (the sock-as-a-glove kind of joke), while eleven-year-olds laughed hardest at the final stage: riddles and jokes built on double meanings.
One detail worth flagging for any parent whose seven-year-old suddenly seems humorless: in this same study, seven-year-olds laughed the least of any age group at nearly every stage of humor, including jokes that both younger and older kids found funny.
Researchers think this dip happens because seven-year-olds are caught between two ways of thinking, no longer satisfied with simple silliness but not yet equipped to fully solve the more complex jokes ahead. It passes. By eight, laughter comes back, and it keeps climbing from there.
What you can do: When a joke that used to be a sure thing suddenly falls flat, resist the urge to explain why it's funny or push a repeat performance. It's a sign your child's thinking has moved on, not that something is wrong.
Instead, try offering the next level up. If your child has aged out of pure silliness (a sock on the wrong body part), introduce a simple riddle or knock-knock joke and see if that's what earns the laugh now. If your seven-year-old seems to have lost their sense of humor entirely for a stretch, that's likely the in-between dip researchers have documented, and it's temporary.
Why Riddles Take Over the Elementary Years
Somewhere around first or second grade, jokes change shape.
Toddler humor is visual and physical. Elementary humor is verbal, and it runs almost entirely on wordplay: "Why did the boy bring a ladder to school? Because he wanted to go to high school."
That joke is impossible to understand without a specific and fairly advanced skill, holding two meanings of the same word in mind at once and noticing the gap between them.
Researchers have tracked this closely using classic riddles built on homonyms, words or phrases that sound alike but mean different things (the classic example: "Why are fish smart? Because they go around in schools."). One well-known study followed first, third, and fifth graders (average ages 7.4, 9.6, and 11.2) and found that comprehension of these riddles rose steadily with age, exactly what you'd expect as vocabulary and abstract thinking grow.
More recent work has gone further, breaking this stage into finer sub-levels: children first get jokes based on simple sound-alike words, then word-part ambiguities, then sentence-structure ambiguities, then idioms, each one a small leap in linguistic sophistication.
Here's the part that tends to surprise parents:
In that same 1977 study, while comprehension of riddles went up with age, self-reported enjoyment actually went down. Older kids understood more jokes but rated them as less funny than younger kids did. One likely explanation: once a riddle stops requiring real mental effort to solve, it stops being satisfying.
The joke was never really about the punchline. It was about the moment of figuring it out.
That reframes the relentless riddle phase for what it actually is. When your child cycles through the same twenty jokes at dinner, they aren't just being repetitive for the sake of it. They're rehearsing a genuinely difficult skill: holding ambiguity in mind, noticing multiple meanings, and resolving them on purpose.
What you can do: Keep a running supply of riddles on hand for car rides and dinner tables, and let your child repeat their favorites as many times as they want. The repetition is doing real work. If you want to nudge them forward, ask a riddle just slightly above what they usually solve, and let them sit with it for a minute before offering a hint. That short window of "wait, what?" is the exact mental stretch that builds this skill.
And if your child insists on explaining a joke to you after they tell it, that's not a sign they didn't get it. Explaining the mechanics of a joke out loud is often how kids check their own understanding.
The Sarcasm Milestone
There's a specific kind of exasperating moment many parents know well: you say something dry and obviously joking, and your child takes it completely literally.
That's not a sign your child is missing something. It's a sign of exactly where their brain is in a very specific developmental process.
Understanding sarcasm and irony requires more than getting a joke. It requires tracking what someone actually believes, what they're pretending to believe, and why the gap between those two things is meant to be funny or pointed rather than simply confusing.
That's a layered mental task researchers call second-order theory of mind (the ability to reason about what one person believes about another person's beliefs), and research places its emergence somewhere between ages five and ten depending on the specific task.
But getting the literal joke is only the first step. A well-known study presented five- and six-year-olds, and separately nine- and ten-year-olds, with scenarios involving both sarcastic and ironic speakers. The younger group could tell that the speaker didn't mean the literal words, but couldn't tell the difference between a sarcastic dig and a gentler ironic comment.
The older group could do both: they understood the non-literal meaning, and they accurately rated the sarcastic remarks as "meaner" than the ironic ones. In other words, telling a joke apart from a jab is a skill that takes most of elementary school to fully build.
This matters for more than family banter. The same mental machinery that lets an eleven-year-old catch a sarcastic tone is the machinery behind reading a room, noticing when a friend is upset despite saying "I'm fine," and picking up on the parts of a story that aren't stated outright.
What you can do: If your child takes a sarcastic comment literally and gets confused or hurt, that's not oversensitivity. Their brain may genuinely not have caught the gap yet between the words and the intent. A quick, warm clarification ("I was actually kidding, I think you did great") does more good than expecting them to read the tone on their own.
As they move through the elementary years, you can help build this skill directly: after a sitcom scene or a comic strip with an ironic line, ask your child what the character really meant versus what they said. That kind of question is a low-key rehearsal for exactly the skill researchers are describing.
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We’re asking parents like you to share their thoughts on topics that matter each week! Cast your vote and see what others think! We’ll chat more about the results next week. 👀
Your child tells a joke at the dinner table, and it completely bombs. Nobody laughs. What do you do?
Thinkster — Humor and quick thinking share the same root: noticing patterns and holding more than one idea in mind at once. Thinkster's live tutors get to know how your child thinks, not just what they've memorized, building that same kind of flexible reasoning skill by skill.
Wow in the World (podcast) — A science podcast built entirely around silliness and real facts, made for the exact age range where riddle humor and wordplay are taking hold. Great for a school-morning car ride.
Mad Libs (app) — The classic word game, digitized. Filling in blanks with nouns and verbs before knowing the story is a genuinely great way to practice the same wordplay skills behind those riddle jokes your child can't stop repeating.
Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes for Kids (books) — Rob Elliott's bestselling joke books are built for exactly the elementary years when riddles take over, with hundreds of one-liners and knock-knock jokes to keep the material fresh.
Until Next Week…
Humor isn't a break from learning. It's a preview of it. The jokes your child tells this year, whether they land or not, are proof that their brain is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing at exactly this age: noticing more, holding more, and reading more between the lines.
As the new school year approaches, that same sense of humor is often what helps your child find their people.
A shared joke on day one of school can do more for a new friendship than almost anything else, so if your child has a favorite riddle or knock-knock joke in their back pocket this fall, let them bring it.
Thanks for joining us in raising kind, capable, and confident humans. We’re so glad you’re here.
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