Among the sense-presentations which awaken the infantile laugh are new and queer sounds of various sorts; and they may well be selected for a study of the transitions from mere joyous exclamation to a hilarious greeting of what is “funny”. Early in the second half of the first year, a child in good health will begin to surmount the alarms of the ear, and to turn what is new and strange into fun. About the 222nd day brave little Ruth was able to laugh, not only at such an odd sound as that produced when her aunt rattled a tin cup on her teeth, but at that of a piano. Preyer’s boy, later in the year, was given to laughing at various new and out-of-the-way sounds, such as that of the piano, of gurgling or clearing the throat, and even of thunder. Odd sounding articulations appear to be especially provocative of laughter about this time. As early as the 149th day, Ruth laughed at new sounds invented by the aunt, such as “Pah! Pah!” Queer guttural sounds seem to have a specially tickling effect. After words and their commoner forms have begun to grow familiar, new and odd-sounding words, especially names, are apt to be greeted with laughter. The child M., when one year nine months old, was much impressed by the {210} exclamation “good gracious!” made by her mother on discovering that the water was coming through the ceiling of a room; and the child would sometimes repeat it in pure fun “shaking with laughter”. When she was two years seven months old she laughed on first hearing the name “Periwinkle”. In these and similar cases of the hilarious response to sounds we seem to have, well within the first nine months, a germ of a feeling for the odd or droll. The early development of this sense of the funny in sounds is aided by their aggressive force for the infant’s consciousness, and by the circumstance that for the young ear they have pronounced characteristics which are probably lost as development advances, and they are attended to, not for their own sake, but merely as signs of things which interest us. The psychical process involved in the transition may be described as follows. Sounds, while by reason of their suddenness and unexpectedness they are apt to take the consciousness off its guard and to produce a kind of nervous shock, are of all sense-stimuli the most exhilarating. The sudden rousing of the consciousness to a large joyous commotion is the fundamental fact. Nor will the jar of the shock, when the sense-organ develops and becomes hardier, interfere with this. On the contrary, it will add something in the shape of an agreeable rebound from a nascent attitude of uneasiness.[133] The laughter of the child at the first sounds of the piano, which have frightened many a child and other young animal, is, in part, a shout of victory. There is here, too, an element of “sudden glory” in the rejoicing, as the new expanding self is dimly conscious of its superiority to the half-alarmed and shrinking self of the moment before. {211}