Marytale
Jokes 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 humor. A six-year-old wants a joke with four moving parts, a word they already know, and a punchline they can shout.
So these 112 were chosen for ages two to ten. Some are playground classics every child deserves to tell — most of the knock knock jokes among them — reworded where they needed it; the rest we wrote ourselves. Every line was read with a small child in mind: nothing about drinking, about how people look, or about whole groups of people.
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.
A 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.
Knock knock. Who's there? Lettuce. Lettuce who?
Show the punchline
Lettuce in, it's freezing out here!
Knock knock. Who's there? Olive. Olive who?
Show the punchline
Olive right next door, you know that
Knock knock. Who's there? Boo. Boo who?
Show the punchline
Don't cry, it's only a joke
Most jokes fail 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.
Why did the cow go upstairs?
Show the punchline
Because the stairs can't go up the cow
What do you call a sleeping bull?
Show the punchline
A bulldozer
Where do fish keep their money?
Show the punchline
In the riverbank
Animal 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.
What do you call a snail on a ship?
Show the punchline
A snailor
Why don't penguins fly?
Show the punchline
They're too short to be pilots
What do you call a fly with no wings?
Show the punchline
A walk
There 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.
What do you call a dinosaur that is sleeping?
Show the punchline
A dino-snore
What do you call a dinosaur with a big vocabulary?
Show the punchline
A thesaurus
Why is it so hard to spell pterodactyl?
Show the punchline
Because the P is silent and never helps
Food 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.
Why did the tomato turn red?
Show the punchline
Because it saw the salad dressing
What do you call cheese that isn't yours?
Show the punchline
Nacho cheese
Why did the egg go to school?
Show the punchline
To get eggucated
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 ever told was made.
After the jokes, a story: illustrated bedtime stories on Marytale
The jokes in this section were chosen and written by Marytale for children aged 2 to 10. Many are classics that children have passed around for generations — knock knock jokes most of all — which we picked and reworded; the rest are our own. Either way, every line was checked so it is safe to read to a small child.