Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

In his analysis of the development of pretense, Alan Leslie details three kinds of pretend play in children. Each kind of pretend play hinges on the child violating the rules regarding correspondences between words and the objects to which they refer. In object substitution, the child substitutes nonliteral meanings of objects for the real meaning of the object. In the young child’s world of pretend play, rocks become bread, swim goggles become cell phones, pillows become walls to fortresses, bedrooms become classrooms, older sisters petty rock stars or demanding old dames in the grocery store they run in the living room.

Children attribute nonliteral properties to objects in a second form of pretend play. While my daughters were five and three, respectively, I spent the better part of a year being a prince dancing with them at various balls. They insisted that I wear a certain pair of sweats, which they ascribed with the velvety beauty of a prince’s medieval tights. This form of play, founded on the attribution of pretend properties, shifted a bit later to a set of identities I felt much more at home in—the ogre or friendly gorilla—all pretend identities that derived from elaborations upon my physical status and regrettable postpartum paunch.

And finally, the young child’s world becomes filled with imaginary objects. In this third kind of pretend play, children simply imagine things that are not there—chalices in the princess’s cupped hand, swords, magic carpets, evil witches and comrades in common cause.

These forms of pretense emerge in systematic fashion at around eighteen months of age. They are all systematically accompanied by laughter. And they lead the child to develop the ability to use words to refer to multiple objects. As children free themselves from one-to-one relations between words and objects, they learn that words have multiple meanings. They also learn that objects can be many things—a banana can be a banana, a phone, an ogre’s nose, or a boy’s penis (when the parents aren’t around).

In the freedom of pretend play, children learn that there are multiple perspectives upon objects, actions, and identities. The child moves out of the egocentrism of his or her own mind and learns that the beliefs and representations of other minds most certainly differ from one’s own. And it is laughter that transports children to this platform of understanding and epistemological insight.

Developmental psychologists who have studied the pretend play of siblings in the home, or the playful wrestling of parents and children, or the playful exchanges of children on the playground, find that laughter reliably initiates and frames play routines. A child or a parent will laugh as a chase game, roughhousing, round of silly wordplay or storytelling gets under way. Linguist Paul Drew carefully analyzed the unfolding of family teasing interactions and found that they are framed by laughs. Laughter is a portal to the world of pretense, play, and the imagination; it is an invitation to a nonliteral world where the truths of identities, objects, and relations are momentarily suspended, and alternatives are willingly entertained. Those hours of pretend play—peek-a-boo games, monsters and princesses, the ogre under the bridge, astronauts—are the gateway to empathy and the moral imagination.

LA PETITE VACATION

 

In the observation that laughter accompanies the child’s capacity to pretend, to participate in alternatives to the realities referred to in sincere communication, we arrive at a hypothesis about laughter. Let’s call this hypothesis the laughter as vacation hypothesis. The name of this hypothesis honors the comedian Milton Berle, witness, it is safe to claim, to millions of laughs during his career. Summing up the mysteries of laughter, Berle proposed, “Laughter is an instant vacation.” If orgasm for the French is la petite mort (the little death), laughter is la petite vacation.

The wisdom of Berle’s hypothesis is found in the etymology of “vacation,” which yields a nuanced story. The word “vacation” traces its linguistic history back to the Latin vacare, which means to be “empty, free, or at leisure” and is defined as a formal suspension of activity or duty. The laugh, then, signals the suspension of formal, sincere meaning. It points to a layer of interaction where alternatives to assumed truths are possible, where identities are lighthearted and nonserious. When people laugh, they are taking a momentary vacation from the more sincere claims and implications of their actions.