Innocence And Happiness

Children's humor is a colorful and interesting world, in which children are protagonists. The objective of the dissertation is to explore the significant relationship between children's humor and children's development in light of the genesis and development of children's humor.At first, the historical development of humor theory is reviewed, then children's humor is mentioned. Children's humor can be divided into two main components, unintended humor and intended humor. In unintended humor, children communicate with object unconsciously according to their particular innocent and naive modality of activity, and fall into a humorous situation spontaneously. In intended humor, children consider in fantasy that something they know could not happen at all or nearly not. It is not serious explanation but the joke on inconsonance developing in fantasy forms the nature of children's intended humor. After differentiation of two main components of children's humor as mentioned above, this dissertation interprets its genesis and development from exploring children's smile, laugh, and joke fantasy, and regards the latter as the origin of children's humor. Once the ability to fantasize and play develops, children will experience a series of phases in the development of their humor, including humor with action, humor with narration, humor with distorted concept and humor with multiple meanings. Although the age each child achieves a particular phase is different, the sequence of those phases is same to all children, namely, the humor that all children show in the first phase is earlier than that in the second phase, and the rest may be deduced by analogy. Because the type of humor children have in every particular phase depends on the level of recognition they achieve, the development of their humor presents that kind of law. Accordingly, the developmental phase of children's humor is consistent with the total tendency of their cognitive development.Children have a potential need for humor, which can play an important role in helping them get rid of repression or other mental harassments, and promoting their physical and mental development. Meanwhile, the importance of humor in the cultivation of children's creativity and socialization can't be underestimated as well. Therefore, in modern society, our school, family and society should provide a milieuor an atmosphere for the development of children's humor on a basis of multidimensional cooperation in order to train their consciousness on humor and the sense of humor.