Introduction and Preparatory Questions

Abstract

Erfurt, June 2011. In a small cinema, children sit on the floor in front of the screen and tell me what they laughed about. Levi, aged 9, enjoys recalling a scene from the film “Greg’s Diary” (2010, directed by Thor Freudenthal):A little later, in the same group, Paul (10 years old) remembers a scene from the film “7 Dwarfs” (2004, directed by Sven Unterwaldt):In another group, a girl recalls an everyday scene from her school:Three different circumstances that made children laugh. The impetus to write this paper was born out of my own interest, because as a storyteller and especially as a filmmaker one has to face a fundamental truth: children expect two things above all from films, and that is for the films to be funny and exciting (cf. Wegener 2010, p. 14 f.; Wegener/Gibbon 2010, p. 60; Richter 2005, p. 49; Goldstein 1994, pp. 326–327 for TV shows; Ehlers/Lange-Fuchs 1992, p. 3). Creating cinematic tension is already a big challenge, but being funny is, in my experience, incomparably more difficult. The question I therefore asked myself was: how can filmmakers make funny children’s films? But what is funny? What is humour anyway? And what is funny for children? Can such different statements as the three quoted above be brought down to a common denominator in terms of humour theory? It makes sense not only to look through publications on this topic, but also to ask children themselves, because it is questionable whether theories that have tried since antiquity to define the nature, functions and characteristics of humour can even encompass children’s humour.