MarytaleJokes for Kids: Clean, Funny and Actually Tellable
112 jokes
A joke only counts when a child can tell it back. That sounds obvious and it rules out most joke lists: half of what turns up online needs a grown-up's vocabulary, and the other half needs a grown-up's sense of humour. A six-year-old wants a joke with four moving parts, a word they already know, and a punchline they can shout.
So all 112 here are ours, written for ages two to ten, and none of them was copied from anywhere. That is not modesty — it is the only way to be sure. Right next door to this section the internet is full of things nobody should read to a child: jokes about drinking, about how people look, about whole groups of them. Writing our own is how we keep every single line safe.
The punchlines are hidden, not removed: tap «Show the punchline» when you have had a guess. Reading it with your eyes first spoils the joke for you and only you — so the choice is yours.
Joke collections
- Knock Knock Jokes for Kids28 jokesA knock knock joke is the first joke most children ever tell on purpose, and there is a reason for that: it comes with its own script. The child does not have to remember how a joke goes — the joke tells them. Knock knock. Who's there? And off it runs, on rails, until the punchline.
- Jokes for Kindergarteners and Preschoolers24 jokesAlmost every joke list fails a four-year-old for the same reason: it is built on puns. A pun needs a child to hold two meanings of a word at once, and that ability arrives somewhere around five — before it, the joke is simply a sentence that does not make sense, and the child watches you laugh and does not know why.
- Animal Jokes for Kids20 jokesAnimal jokes are the easiest ones for a child to remember, and it is not because animals are funny. It is because the child already has the picture. A joke about a penguin arrives with a penguin already standing in the room, so the only new thing to hold on to is the punchline.
- Dinosaur Jokes for Kids20 jokesThere is an age — usually somewhere between four and seven — when a child knows more dinosaur names than you do, corrects your pronunciation of them, and will happily explain which ones did not actually live at the same time. These 20 jokes are for exactly that child.
- Food Jokes for Kids20 jokesFood jokes are the ones that get used, because the material is already on the table. Half a joke is the picture in your head, and if the picture is the thing on the plate in front of the child, the joke arrives ready-made.
What works at what age
Ages 2 to 4. Skip the wordplay entirely. At this age the funny part is the surprise, not the pun — an animal doing something it should not, a silly noise, a thing in the wrong place. Expect the child to tell the joke back with the punchline first and the setup after, and laugh anyway: that is exactly how it should go at three.
Ages 5 to 7. This is the golden age of knock knock. The child now understands that a word can mean two things, and that discovery is worth about four hundred repetitions of the same joke. Let them. Take turns, and get one wrong on purpose now and then.
Ages 8 to 10. Now the game turns around: they write their own. Give them the shape — question, unexpected answer, one word doing double duty — and let them try. The first one will not be funny, the second will be terrible, and the third will actually land. That is how every joke on this page was made.
After the jokes, a story: illustrated bedtime stories on Marytale →
Every joke on this site is written by Marytale for children aged 2 to 10. Nothing here is copied from another collection, and nothing here is a traditional text: jokes are not folklore, and joke books have authors. Writing our own is also how we guarantee that every line is safe to read to a small child.