Children and sense of humour developing...

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I was intrigued by the discussion on the other forum and Aspie's sense of humour and there seemed to be some trends within that.

What about kids? I would have said in the last 6 months my five year old son who is waiting assessment has developed a much more fun side, he laughs more etc and seems quite interested in humour.

He's been working on jokes for a while, he will repeat jokes from TV etc and likes word play style jokes replacing dialogue with funny expressions and naughty style replacements. He will of course say naturally funny things but he loves to make you laugh but possibly more interestingly he seems to be analytically taking humour apart to see how the form works...he will mess around with formatting jokes and asking if they are funny...sometimes they are, sometimes he bends the form too far.

I suppose like any kid he likes slapstick humour...he will laugh like a goat at funny cartoons etc. I suppose what I find most intriguing is he has had for a while a sort of teasing style of humour....like if he knows something annoys you he will tease you that he is going to do it beyond that he can seem to do quite natural style humour style things.....he was being grumpy in the morning one day last week...later on I teased him and asked who had been a grumpy monkey in the morning...he looked at me and said his little sister's name burst out laughing an ran away up the road....made me laugh like a drain like he often does....

I guess in my inexperienced mind I find this development of humour as being an indication of more NT behaviour or am I well off the mark?

My kiddo has always been hilarious. I've always known him well enough to understand his jokes. Now that he is older, he is gearing his jokes towards his NT friends because he loves making people laugh. He LOVES sarcasm as well. When I was explained what sarcasm was he thought it was the funniest thing ever. I'm paying the price now! lol

My son also does this - IMO, it's a very Aspie sort of way to approach humor, to break it down into it's component pieces and test, test, test until you get a laugh. He has come up with some gutbusters on his own, but as a backup has memorized several joke books, as a joke is an interaction he understands well: he tells joke>other kid laughs>other kid tells joke (or, more likely, he tells another one)>he laughs or smiles when the other kids laugh>they all get silly and bang on the table or fall on the floor. Not sure if it's so for your son, but it's a much more calculated thing for mine than for the NT kids he shares jokes with. Makes me wonder how many professional comedians are on the spectrum: clearly it's the process for writing really good jokes.

I do always double-check to make sure he understands - he doesn't always get it when, for instance, someone substitutes a word for something chocolate for the word poop - but he does get the cues that something mildly inappropriate was said, so he often tests the ones he's unsure of on me before taking them out in public (I've gotten used to checking if he understood the joke.)

After a while, he eventually figured out the conceit, but I'm guessing when penises and boobs and sex jokes are "in" we're going to have to go through all this again (oog.)

My ASD 5 yo is also revelling in his new found ability to make people laugh at his jokes! It really is wonderful to see. Usually he will tell a new joke over and over as soon as he learns it (either reading from a joke book or hearing it from TV or another person) but recently we were on a 4 day camping trip. On the last morning we were there, he breaks out this joke:

What do you call a crab who steals carrots?

(you HAVE to respond with I don't know or he gets upset)

A CRABBITT!

We all laughed hilariously as none of us had ever heard him tell that one before.

Then he says "I've been saving that one!"

Which made me laugh even harder. I had to think that showed some pretty impressive impulse control on his part!