Laughing at the Prodigy

When I was driving home the other day, I tuned into NPR and was disturbed by what I heard. A young piano prodigy was being interviewed, presumably still on stage. A male voice softly lobbed this question, as if it needed to be asked delicately: “Do you still get nervous up here with all these people watching?” “Sometimes I do…but when I start playing I stop shaking and just get into it…” She was eleven years old. Her speech had adult cadences but still retained the aural pertness particular to children. Or perhaps the cadence of her speech had something to do with being crowd-savvy. She knew when to pause for laughter and when she could resume. And there was so much laughter! When she said that children shouldn’t “sit on their butt all day and watch TV” this bit of wisdom was greeted with veritable roars. Even comedians are never greeted with such unabashed laughter. What was strange about the laughter is that it was all the same tone. If you ever really listen to a crowd laughing, you’ll usually hear, behind the braying of the lead laugher (the one that likes to lead the crowd into it and then punctuate with one last chuckle after everyone’s done) you’ll hear other laughs. Doubting sniffs. Knowing chuckles. Restrained snorts of half-derision half-amusement. Laughs that seemed pained, as if they’re an involuntary acknowledgement of something. Wild peals that seem as if they could only come from someone who hasn’t laughed in forever, someone who nearly forgot how and is celebrating the return of laughter in their very laughing. “Ahhhhaaaa I can laugh!” Regardless of whether or not all these types are represented, the point is laughter varies. Not everyone is amused in the same way. But this crowd all seemed to be uniformly tickled. It was all the Awwwww how cute! laughter, and nothing else. There wasn’t a single cynic to break that up with a scoff-laugh hybrid.
I suppose one could say that this is a wonderful thing. Its wonderful that we all are universally charmed by precocious children. That we all respect and delight in innocence enough. That ,even in this ever darkening world, with all its moral quandaries and tensions, we can still take a time-out to enjoy—and even benefit from—the simple wisdom of children. But I don’t see it this way. I think the way we laugh at precocious children is incredibly dark.
One reason I think we laugh at precocious children is that we love the naiveté of children attempting to act like an adults. No matter how hard a child tries to sound mature, there will always be a word or a tone that will give them away. So we wait for that sweet “giveaway” clue (like the piano-prodigy saying “butt) to laugh, presumably because we’re relieved to see that you can’t escape childhood through will. Isn’t it cute to watch a child fall back into their rank after adorably scrambling to look adult? We laugh at how absurdly naïve it is for a child to think they can appear as anything else. And we laugh in relief that children will be children and adulthood does, in fact, wait.
We also laugh, I think, a little out of admiration. It’s sort of noble for a child to fight back their stutters, their scatteredness, their naughtiness, and try to be more than they are. And they have a certain idealism that we adults lack. We know the limits of what we can be, and we know what we can and can’t control. But isn’t it heartening to see a child, unfettered by these truths?
Now I think this is all dark, because of what it says about adulthood. The fact is, no adult will EVER be laughed at the way the little girl was. Adults, quite simply, cannot be precocious, because we see precociousness as purely a child’s quality. Still, why couldn’t an adult be precocious—couldn’t those qualities appear later in life? Naively trying to be something older, wiser, and maybe better than you are. What would that be for an adult? Would that be an adult who tries to be “post-human?” Something better than the human race as is?
And the naïve part. Certainly there are adults who naively, we would say, pursue what’s out of reach, or don’t see their limits. But this group of people isn’t charming to us the way a child is with the same qualities. An adult like this may look brave, or admirable, or stupid, or short-sighted, but they will never look cute. They will never elicit that all-agreed-upon laughter we aim at the prodigy child, overstepping her little self.
There is then, a limit to how much an adult can charm us. To be charmed, so purely and thoroughly as we are by children, is our only real form of communal love. It is one of our few, if not only, universal affections, and it ends for everyone at about 14. We have a little hate for all adults, for their inherent un-cuteness (because we are adults, and see ourselves as "un-cute"), and that’s what makes what should be charming naiveté look like idiocy.
One final reason why I think we laugh at precocious children is that we need one outlet to laugh at how impossible it is, really, to be an adult. When a child slips up and shows her age, we sympathize so deeply, because we were forever slipping up ourselves. However, our slip-ups are never greeted with the warm laughter of strangers. We never laugh at another adult’s vain and misguided and painfully sincere attempts to get through the world. We should, though. We should see the whole fucked-up human enterprise as adorable in its limitations and endless, even glorious, earnestness.