Who's There?

At dinner E decides we should tell jokes. We start with her favorite:

E: What's your name?
Me: Becca
E: What color is the sky?
Me: Blue.
E: What's the opposite of down?
Me: Up.
E: Becca blew up! [general hilarity ensues]

We rapidly progess to knock-knock jokes. I go first:

Me: Knock knock.
E: Who's there?
Me: Isabel.
E: Isabel who?
Me: Is a bell ringing?

Then it's E's turn:

E: Knock knock.
Me: Who's there?
E: Emma.
Me: Emma who?
E: Look, Emma is riding a bicycle. [more hilarity]

The connection that I know she is making--because I am her mom and I know how her mind works and I have heard every knock-knock joke that she and her sister have ever told--is to one of M's favorites, itself just a bit off:

M: Knock knock.
Whoever: Who's there?
M: Isabel.
Whoever: Isabel who?
M: Is that a bell on your bike?

So E went from a trace memory of Isabel and bike, via her best friend Emma, to Emma riding a bike. And she found it very funny. The point being that she doesn't get the knock-knock concept at all; she thinks that random connections are essentially hilarious, which of course they are, when she says them and laughs uproariously.

This all made me remember a big discussion with J and J many years ago over the ontology of knock-knock jokes. It was when M and N were just at the age to start telling knock-knock jokes wrong, and we were trying to explain to them how to do it right, but we only succeeded in getting ourselves all confused. The source of the problem was this one:

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Ella.
Ella who?
Elephant.

J decided that the heart of the joke was Allen Funt, and that knock-knock jokes hinged upon...well, I'm not quite sure what his argument was, but it had something to do with names, and J and I argued vehemently against him that it was simply puns. Then somehow we got distracted by a limousine and a lot of margaritas, and I don't think we ever resolved the issue, though we referred to it frequently over the years, and J and I were always right.

Anyway, what's interesting to me is how much kids love knock-knock jokes even before they get them, and how hard it is for them to get them. According to that most eminent source, Wikipedia, developmental psychologists study knock-knock jokes to understand kids' linguistic development. I'd like to see some of that research. It could be a lot more interesting than knock-knock jokes.