Children performing humor: Gender identity and social alignment

Abstract

This article focuses on humor in child language from a gender perspective. As part of children’s metapragmatic competence, we aim to find out what kind of strategies they use to produce humor and the gender patterns children imprint in their humorous narratives. Specifically, our data come from a corpus of 140 humorous narratives made by 7 and 8-year-old boys and girls. They had to describe a school exchange in Mars. The participants were 58 girls (41 %) and 82 boys (59 %) from five schools of the province of Alicante, Spain. Data were collected in 2015 within the framework of a research project. Our study uses the framework outlined by Helga Kotthoff (2006) to describe humor from a gender perspective: aggressiveness, status, social alignment, and corporality. Results show that by the age of 8, boys and girls already project and construct their gender identity through humor: boys, by displaying aggressiveness and status, girls, overwhelmed by reality and in uncomfortable situations. Both resort to scatology as a source for humor.