Are dumb kids happier than smart kids?

When the kids were little — around 3 and 4 — we went to visit friends. One morning, I went for a walk with my guys and my friends’ children, who were about the same age as mine. As we walked, the kids were all picking up interesting stones and handing them to me to carry. After a while, I began to stagger when they’d hand me one. “Oh! Getting…too…heavy!” I said, pretending to struggle under the load. My guys thought it was hilarious, and of course piled more rocks on as fast as they possibly could.

But my friends’ kids were stunned, staring at me like…well, like I had rocks in my head. “Those rocks cannot possibly be that heavy,” my friends’ daughter said carefully, cocking her head and examining me as I paused to wipe my brow.

Their reaction surprised me. Didn’t they get the joke? Now, my friends are some of the smartest people I know, and their children are extremely sharp, too. But I’d like to think my kids are no dummies, either. So why the difference in response? Is humor a learned thing — or are smarter kids’ funny bones harder to tickle?

Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” Coming from a smart guy who committed suicide, you’d think he was on to something. But smart people laugh, right? Granted it’s at things the rest of us find “nerdy,” maybe. Maybe there’s a continuum of humor. Slapstick on one end of the scale and laughing at a Mobius strip joke on the other?

At the end of my college experience, I dated an intelligent guy. An intellectual, really. At that time, I thought that was the direction I was heading — all deep, metaphysical conversations in cafe corners with our elbows among coffee mugs. That relationship ended, and now I know I could never have sustained it anyway. Maybe I’m just not that smart. Or maybe I’m too lazy to push my brain that hard. But while I enjoyed his company, we really didn’t laugh a whole lot together. Looking back, we could have really used a solid infusion of light-hearted fun. Silly fun, even. Poke-your-hidden-coffee-creamer-eyeball fun, possibly, although I’m pretty sure he would have been horrified that that amused me. I guess that makes him smarter than me?

Remember that movie with Steve Allen…Parenthood, I think? At his son’s birthday party, his sister’s brainy child was looking aghast at her cousin (Allen’s youngest child), who was running around with a bucket on his head, yelling, “I can’t see! I can’t see!” At the time that I watched this flick, I didn’t have kids yet, but I remember thinking, “That’s going to be my kid.” (The one with the bucket, not the smart kid.) I think the mom even says to her daughter, “Doesn’t that look like fun, dear?” and the little girl gives her a look that says, “Puh-leeze.” But you know what? If laughing at silly things means I’m not smart, then I guess I don’t want to be a smarty.

So that brings us back around to the question, are smarter kids doomed to laugh less than their peers? I hope not. Maybe they’ll just be challenged to seek out — or create — humor that gets them giggling. I’d be okay with that. Everyone likes to laugh. And it’s good for you, too. That’s part of the whole thrust of Polka Dot Suitcase — finding ways to be creative and just plain fun with your family. Brainiacs and regular folk alike.

Here at PDS we laugh a lot. We also proudly wear our buckets on our heads. We have to. It protects our delicate brains, and apparently we need every brainy bit we’ve got in there. Who’s smart now?