It is a lifelong discipline of mine to avoid this column defaulting to Kids Say the Darnedest Things, but I fear I must make an exception this week. My son is making inroads into comedy, now that he goes to bed clutching a book of jokes by Jamie Smart. These are the real, old-fashioned groaners of mythical archetype. (Sample: what do you call a bear with no ear? B!)
His joy at the wordplay is matched only by his seeming addiction to their grammar, causing him to take pleasure in jokes he can’t possibly understand. He does not, for example, know what a byte is, but seems delighted it’s something a crocodile has in common with a computer. Meaning, it seems, is less important than rhythm as he giggles himself to sleep each night.
My son now peppers every conversation with gags so wonderfully bad they’d strip paint. Why did the cow cross the road, he’ll ask, poised and trembling with glee. To get to the udder side, he answers, before I even have time to respond. The secret of comedy may be timing, but for my son this merely means speed is the order of the day. That he delivers the above line while stroking imaginary udders on his belly, only adds to the efficiency of this process. (Edinburgh comics take note).
But it is in natural speech where he has become most hilarious. This week he told me he wanted a pet: a cat first and then a dog, because he’s still a little scared of dogs and believes that, by some transitive property he wouldn’t expound on further, having a cat around would help him acclimatise to dog ownership. He caveated this immediately by soberly telling me that cats themselves posed difficulties, specifically when it came to feeding. ‘How so?’ I asked – curious, since he has never spent more than five minutes in feline company. ‘Well,’ he said, with a weary sigh that suggested this was a dilemma which has cursed his every waking hour, ‘cats really are fish-crazed.’
I don’t know why this made me laugh so much, and he certainly didn’t. I suppose it was just the absurdly blank specificity of this declaration, alloyed with the sheer joy of a small ginger six-year-old casually using hyphenated adjectives regarding a situation he can never have experienced in real life.
Nothing, however, has made me laugh more than his latest adventures in writing. He wrote a new book this week (four sheets of A4 paper, folded and stapled to provide a 16-page tome) about his favourite Minecraft Lego set, complete with author’s biography and a page at the end advertising other, entirely notional, books in that same series.
He couldn’t see why we found that funny either; the falsified ISBN and publication data on the inside sleeve; his itemised list of Also By This Author thumbnails, breathlessly detailed in tiny handwriting; and, gloriously, the fact that he referred to each with captions indicating whether they were ‘common’, ‘rare’ or ‘super rare’, so that avid collectors can judge their chances of completing a full set. I’m biased, but it is, by some distance, the funniest book I’ve ever read. But then, kids do write the darnedest things.
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