Laughing Baby Videos

A little bit of causal hilarity from Rory and family. Babies need to spend a lot of time learning about cause and effect. Things that we take for granted only because we learnt it so young. Things like the fact that some objects are soft and some are hard. The second ones are more fun to bang on the floor. But they fall to the floor if you throw them out of your highchair. And if you do someone will pick it back up for you. Learning that one thing leads to another needs a lot of repetition and a lot of trial and error, so much the better if it is fun for everyone.

Here’s what Chrystyan has to say about Rory’s experiments

What made your baby laugh?: Baby Rory laughs as Daddy and her play with the light switch. She hasn’t learned to turn it on yet, but she can certainly turn it off!

How old is your baby?: 11 Months

Who else was present?: Mommy, Daddy & Baby Rory Any other comments:

We’re doing a lot of family videos, our little girl is such a ball of hilarity. She finds the weirdest things funny and loves to get a catch in her stomach. She’s a daredevil, she is. This was just too good to pass up. Please help us spread her around, her laughter has brought us joy and we’re sure it’s going to make you smile!

Thank you Rory and family.

Here we see 8.5 month old Evan having hysterics over mummy Michelle’s new tape measure. It’s so funny that he falls over laughing. I love how the family dog is completely indifferent to it all.

Thanks to Evan, Michelle and their dog Toddy for this video.

Babies laugh at lots of things we wouldn’t expect them to. 50 million people have wondered why baby Micah laughed at tearing paper. The most common explanation I’ve heard is that Micah probably laughs at everything. Micah does seem to be a very giggly baby, but do other babies find tearing paper funny. In science we don’t like rely on a single example, so I am grateful to David Green for running an experiment on his daughter Lily (5months) to see what she thought of tearing paper. As you can see, David, Lily and Lily’s mum replicated the original finding. Thank you for the data.

Mind you, I’ve still no idea why babies find tearing paper so funny. More data would be good so please feel free to try this on your baby and send me your findings.

Laughter is a two-way street. It isn’t long before laughing babies start clowning around, trying to make us laugh. They’re pretty good at it too. Although they do have a tendency to laugh very hard at their own jokes. Here we see one year old Callan playing the clown for his mum, dad and granddad.

Thanks to Callan’s uncle Danny for sending us the clip.

Apparently, this laughing baby (aka William Nilsson) is so well known that he is known as THE laughing baby. He even has his own wikipedia entry. Here’s what they say:

The Laughing Baby is an Internet neologism given to a YouTube viral video of a baby laughing. The video has become an internet phenomenon with over 6 million views^[2] (The “Hahaha ” version by BlackOleg, which is exactly the same as the original, was viewed for mais de 103 million times as of Sep. 2008). ^[3]Uploaded by a Swedish man with the pseudonym  spacelord72, ^[4]and later re-uploaded and popularized by another user known as BlackOleg, ^[5] the “Laughing Baby” is one of the few internet memes that have entered popular culture.^[1]

I wonder what else makes him laugh? (Most things, I imagine)

We’ve probably had this one before but a friend just sent it to me again and it’s definitely worth a second go. And when I took a closer look I noticed something new. I like how the baby’s laughter stops completely dead once the bubbles are gone but then laughs just as hard the next time. That’s a bit weird if you think about it. At least if you imagine it from an adult’s perspective.

But as everyone knows, babies absolutely love repetition. They can play the same game over and over again, listen to the same nursery rhyme, or ask for the same story or DVD more times than would try the patience of the Dalai Lama.