Friday, November 10, 2006

Getting Into The Act


Where does your sense of humor come from?

I'm asking because I recently said to someone that I love Bambina's sense of humor, that I cannot believe the extent of the development of humor in a 2 1/2 year old. She "gets" jokes, she makes some up herself, she has a physicality to her humor and a nuance as to what she finds funny that makes me laugh so hard. Maybe every 2 year-old has it, but I'm just not sure how they get it. The person responded that she'd get her sense of humor from me, ie, being raised by me will transmit my sense of humor to her, so obviously she and I find the same things to be funny.

But is that really the case? I don't know; I'm asking. My brother, sister and I were all raised in the same house with the same parents and went to the same schools. We could not have more divergent senses of humor if you put out a casting call for Three Divergent Senses of Humor. So did we get our humor from our parents? I definitely have a funny bone more along the lines of my Dad: potty humor, political satire, deflating personal puffery. But did I get it from living with him or was I born with it? I'm stumped.

Anyone have any thoughts on this, either scientific or anecdotal? Help a sister out. In the meantime, we here at Chez Haggis will be repeating ad nauseum the joke of the week that Bambina can't get enough of: "How do sheep get clean? They take a baaaaath!" Cue the wild kiddie laughter while running around the house naked, save some big girl underwear and butterfly wings on her back, yelling "baaaaaath!".

You know, just like her momma.

1 comment:

Geoff said...

Well, the way I see it, most people get their humour from their parents, or in spite of them.

I'm the latter. Maybe your daughter is the former. Who knows? All I can say is I'm glad she's got a sense of humour. A lot of people these days seem not to... like they need a nun or something to tell them it's okay to laugh.