Charles Darwin believed children’s laughter to be the early appreciation of humour. But when and why do young people develop humour, and what can it tell us about their development?
In 2018, the Daily Mirror reported that an ultrasound scan at 30 weeks of pregnancy showed a foetus smiling in the womb. While never disproved, this is admittedly rare. Usually, scientists have found, a baby will smile in its first few months, and laughter will follow soon afterwards.
Caspar Addyman, psychology lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, explains, ‘There is a huge amount of variability, but smiling does come first. A smile will come in the first month or two, then the first laugh at around three or four months. Less than 0.1 per cent of parents say that by 18 months their child has never laughed.’
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