Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Humor - A Faculty of the Gifted

After having undergone several evaluations to determine intellectual capacity, I noticed something that remained consistent in all prerequisite checklists for further evaluation, 'a keen sense of humor.�

How important is this quality in regards to intelligence, and what makes it so complex? Not to brag, I'll often say something that I don't mean to be taken as funny, and people swear it's the funniest thing...and when I actually try to be funny people either boo me, don't get it, or call me weird. What makes this aspect of human faculty unique to the gifted experience?

DS6 has understood sarcasm since diapers. He has an extremely dry sense of humor and things just pop out. He's extremely sarcastic and I must admit understands humor better than many adults I know.

DS7 taught DS4(then just 3yo) how to use air quotes for laughs.

It was hilarious to see a 3yo not only being sarcastic, but punctuating it with the dreaded air quotes! Just ridiculous!

Humor is one of the reasons I suspected DS4 might be GT. He's just very aware of social cues and is skilled at using humor to fit in, especially with a group of older kids.

I think a keen sense of humour is on a lot of giftedness checklists because a lot of humour relies on the ability to see connections between seemingly disparate things; witty wordplay relies on a capacious vocabulary, while allusive humour relies on a broad enough general knowledge to have something to which to allude!

It's a joke a minute around here, but I just have to share one or two with you:

There's a breakfast cereal in Canada called Shreddies (don't think it's available in the States? but you have something similar--Chex, is it? little woven squares of whole wheat, anyway). Frenchie has been eating this stuff twice daily for over 50 years (shudder), so any news on the Shreddies front is of interest in our household. This last autumn, they had an advertising shtick saying that Shreddies were a new improved diamond shape (rotated the photo on the box)--Diamond Shreddies Good New Exciting, Square Shreddies Bad Old Boring.

All this by way of preamble to 7yo Harpo's joke, that the theme music for Diamond Shreddies should be the Jewel Song from Faust.

Groucho (5) was looking at a Georgia O'Keeffe painting the other day (one of the cattle skull ones), and said, "I know what that cow's name was." "What," say I, "Yorick," says he.

(I think they're really funny, but you can see why the other kids don't get them; I'm afraid that their humour is not really helping them fit in at this point.)

One more funny--this past summer, Harpo kept wandering around saying "these are prime times, yes, sir, these are prime times." I finally asked him what he was on about, and he told me that until Daddy's birthday in the fall, all five of us were prime-number years old, and that he didn't see that this was likely ever to happen again, unless we lived to be really, really old.

peace
minnie

PS, landsgenesis2, I see you haven't been around here too long, so welcome from me! Hope you'll enjoy it here--I certainly have. We're glad you're here!

Yes, welcome landgen2! I liked minnimarx's description as to why humor is on the checklists. What I have found IRL is that all my best friends are people who "get my jokes."

Very funny minnimarx! I can see you and your children are on a different plane of gifted from me - i was thinking Jewel the pop singer sang something from Faust and i finally got the joke after googling.

We call 'em shredded wheat down here. Very original.

Dear Pauli,

It's not a "different plane of gifted" at all! It's just a different CD collection! (And the lads only got interested in my Gounod CDs after reading Tintin--Bianca Castafiore's "signature" aria is the Jewel Song, so they get some of their cultural awareness from comic books!!!)

peace
minnie

Ha ha! I forgot about bianca, silly me. It's been awhile since i read tin tin. My DS5 has a different comic (cartoon) collection for his knowledge (not so much cultural awareness) - scooby doo! He was looking at my scrabble letters last night, and I had T-O-X-blank-N. He said "I think that spells toxin." I asked how he knew that, and he said, "From one of my scooby doo movies!"

My 10 year old son says funny things that sometimes take me a few minutes to get. Sometimes I can't stop laughing and I am somewhere where you are supposed to be quiet and he will say something like "Mom, are you okay? It really wasn't that funny." and he will look at me with a serious look on his face and tell me that it might help to bite my tongue and if that doesn't work, and then he gets an even more serious look on his face and puts his hands on my shoulders, he says very seriously "think about the stimulus package."

His humor is not limited to wordplay. He uses accents and sometimes different voices and physical humor and acts out funny improv things that he makes up and he does not break character, even though he is looking them straight in the eye and they are laughing.

He uses a lot of sarcasm in his humor, especially with his adult sister and she has the same problem that I do with some of his jokes. Sometimes it takes a few minutes to realize what he said and she'll call him back and tell him he needs to be sent to brat camp.

He uses a lot of self-deprecating humor like describing himself as a freak and a geek and a big mix of disorders and syndromes and he will make up some that he doesn't have--like alien hand syndrome which of course he acts out or Tourettes which he says he has a form of (he doesn't) that leaves him with no control over some of the funny things he says--the words just pop out of his mouth.

He uses humor to mediate fights between his sister and her boyfriend. Recently she called to complain to her brother that her boyfriend would not get her something to drink when she asked him to and she always did things for him and he just didn't get that it would be nice if he would do things for her once in a while. She was on speaker phone so her boyfriend could hear her and she told her brother that she was going to break up with her boyfriend over this because she was tired of him not doing anything for her and she thought her 10 year old brother would offer some support. He told her to calm down, and no she wasn't going to break up with him and he would try to help her if he could. Then he gave her step by step instructions on how to fix the drink and said he was reading the instructions from "How to Fix a Drink by Yourself for Dummies" and he would send her a copy of the book if she needed it. There was more to it that I can't remember but he got his sister laughing and she forgot about being mad.

And I think he looks at life like it is one big humorous soap opera. He calls it "Unhappy Days" and sometimes he makes up the script for the day's show in the backseat of the car as we are driving. When he has a choice between laughing or crying he will always choose to laugh and in doing so he makes other people laugh, taking their minds off of problems.

Yes! One of the stand out clues for us that DD 26 mos. was different was that she had an adult-ish sense of humor from as soon as she could laugh, and especially around 10 months. Somehow, our DD, as a baby, would laugh at things that were genuinely out of place, uncommon, or ironic. She wasn't telling jokes yet, but she saw humorous situations at a very early age.

Other babies would laugh at new things, like seeing the pillow on the couch, but our DD somehow seemed to be able to zero in on the incongruities in the environment at a time where everything *should* seem all new. We could not figure that out.

She is now cracking jokes, changing the words to songs, and showing off her physical comedy.

I am glad to find this thread. I have also wondered if my kids sense of humor is a family attribute or a GT attribute. DD10 has a great timing when it comes to one liners and sarcasm.

My favorite memory is from her toddler years. She was eating a snack of fruit and cubed cheese. She was making a tower from the cheese and purposely not lining up the cubes well. I observed for a while as she was looking if the tower would fall over and asked what she was doing. Her response was: "Look Mom, it's the Leaning Tower of Cheesa". She must have heard about the leaning tower of Pisa somewhere, but I didn't recall talking about it.

Jen