A gifted child has a more developed sense of humor by comprehending the 'gray areas' in language.
One of the anecdotal methods for determining if a child is gifted is her ability to understand adult jokes and stories, or in other words, to be able to see beyond the black and white objective words and to notice how things are related in more of an abstract. Being able to do this takes intuition, a good knowledge base, and the ability to reason beyond her years.
Research has been conducted that measured spontaneous mirth and comprehension where the reactions of 60 gifted and 60 regular education students were videotaped responding to various kinds of humor and non-humor. The results were that the gifted students performed significantly elevated - they "got" the jokes that the regular education students did not.
So, What is Humor?
To appreciate why and how gifted students respond to humor, it is important to examine what humor is. This article is dedicated to the notion that sometimes in expressing oneself, a person does not have to speak concretely or directly. While everything that is taught in school focuses on expressing thoughts clearly, satire, parody, and cartoons have a way of delivering a very real message without actually coming out and saying what they mean. These elements are the "gray areas" of language and communication, such as innuendo and allusions.
Most successful satire/parody/cartoons rely on the reader or listener being able to "read between the lines," and to have an inside understanding of the subtleties and nuances of a subject. Gifted children can be particularly strong in this area.
Successful satire/parody/cartoons are much more than simple slams, insults, sarcasm, or put-downs. Engaging satire/parody/cartoons are based in both simple truths in the eyes of the beholders, and in justifiable humor.
Sometimes we laugh so that we don't cry. When someone drops something in the kitchen and someone calls him a name and everybody laughs, that is not about being clever; that is about putting somebody down and hurting feelings. This has nothing to do with humor, and has everything to do with power. Anyone can call someone else a name to hurt his feelings, but successful satire/parody/cartoons have a purpose in mind: they want the reader or listener to think about the topic in a way that they might not otherwise imagine. When someone insults someone else, or puts someone else down, more often than not the person who does the insulting does more to degrade himself than his victim.
When someone cleverly parodies or satirizes someone or something else, the person performing the satire is more often than not positively regarded as being witty and nobody's feelings are hurt because everyone is laughing with the joke, not at a victim. Gifted children can have both a keen sense of humor and good ear for honest wit.
Where Humor is Vital
In fact, in Great Britain, satire is a legitimately recognized form of communication even at the highest levels of government! In the British Parliament when someone is making a speech, another member of Parliament is allowed to interrupt the speech for a brief, appropriate, applicable, and witty remark designated to rebuke what the speaker is saying. This satire, called a heckle, is considered almost an art form in England. On the other hand, if the remark is boorish or insulting, the person making the insult is strongly and swiftly disciplined by the other members of Parliament.
Think of good satire/parody/cartoons as being a literary hit to the top of the head, a humorous wake-up call about an issue or a person. Again, the only limit is that the reader or listener must "get it," and gifted children often have that ability.
For example, if someone made a humorous reference to his dour dog-owning next-door neighbor when he was a child as being, "a very dogmatic person," he might think that it is endlessly funny; however, it is unlikely that anyone else would "get it." Another angle here is to think about popular music. The odds are that anyone considerably older than the listener is would have a hard time appreciating the music the same way that the listener would because each person’s experiences are different. Winning satire/parody/cartoons rely heavily on one’s point of view, as do most forms of communication.
If a child can see beyond the black and white objective nature of words and notice how things are related in more of an abstract, this could be a positive sign of giftedness.
