Gross, Weird, Absurd, and Educationally Sound

Why I started paying attention to absurdity

I didn't set out to study humor. I was researching how children learn, specifically, what conditions produce engagement versus disengagement in kids between kindergarten and fifth grade. I was conducting interviews, observing behavior, and testing small prototypes. Humor kept showing up in the data, but I kept treating it as noise. Kids being kids. Silliness as a byproduct of comfort, not a mechanism worth examining.

Then the pattern got too consistent to ignore.

Every child I observed who was deeply engaged in a learning activity was either laughing, being silly, or interacting with content that was deliberately absurd. And every child I observed who was disengaged was sitting in an environment that had been carefully stripped of anything unpredictable, messy, or funny.

I started asking a different question. Not "how do I get kids to focus despite the silliness?" but "what if the silliness is the thing producing the focus?"

The neuroscience is on the kids' side

Children's brains are pattern-recognition machines. They're constantly scanning their environment for novelty: things that are new, unexpected, or incongruent with what they already know. This is an evolutionary feature, not a flaw. Noticing the unexpected is how young brains build mental models of how the world works. Something that doesn't fit the pattern gets flagged, examined, and remembered.

Absurdity is pure pattern-breaking. A word problem about two trains leaving a station fits every expectation a child has about school. It sounds like school. It feels like school. It activates the same mental frame as every other worksheet they've ever seen and for many kids, that frame is associated with boredom, pressure, and the risk of being wrong.

A word problem about two dinosaurs racing to a taco stand breaks the pattern immediately. The brain registers the incongruity (wait, that's not how math problems work) and leans in. Attention is captured not through discipline or instruction but through surprise. And once attention is captured, learning can happen.

This isn't a theory I'm imposing on the data. It's what the kids keep showing me.

A lesson in fart quizzes

My third grader showed me a math quiz he built inside a learning game. He didn't build it because a teacher assigned it. He built it because he wanted to. And the question he wrote was this:

"If I farted two times, and Naomi farted two times, and Michael farted two times, how many farts is that?"

He answered his own question — six — without hesitating. Then he extended the problem voluntarily: "It stinks six times more than one person farting." Then he laughed so hard he could barely keep talking.

My instinct as a researcher was to look past the joke and focus on the math. But the longer I sat with this moment, the more I realized the joke was the finding. The humor wasn't incidental to the learning. It was the reason the learning happened at all.

This is the same child who puts his head down on his desk during classroom math instruction. Same subject. Same cognitive demand. Completely different output. The variable that changed wasn't the content, it was the emotional wrapper around it. And that wrapper was a fart joke.

Let's dissect this:

• First, he chose to build a quiz at all. Nobody asked him to. The learning game he was using, a platform called Blooket, allows kids to create their own content. Most kids play other people's quizzes. Micah builds his own. That alone is significant. He's not consuming educational content. He's producing it. And the act of production requires him to understand the underlying concept well enough to construct a problem around it.

• Second, he chose the difficulty. He told me his content is "kind of like a fifth grade" level, two grades above where he actually is. When I suggested something simpler, like 1+1, he dismissed it immediately: "That's a kindergarten question." He's not reaching for absurdity because he can't handle real content. He's reaching for absurdity while handling content that's at or above his grade level. The humor and the rigor coexist.

• Third, and this is the part I think matters most, he extended the problem on his own. After answering "six," he didn't stop. He calculated the comparative smell. He brought in additional variables. He was doing voluntary, self-directed mathematical reasoning inside a joke he made up. No teacher prompted it. No curriculum required it. The joke created a context where thinking felt like playing, and so he kept playing.

Compare that to what happens at his desk. Same child. Same math. He puts his head down, gets tired, can't remember anything. The content didn't change. The permission to be silly did.

The shows kids choose tell us everything

I started looking at the media children voluntarily consume — the shows they watch, the games they play, the YouTube channels they follow — and the pattern is overwhelming. The content kids are most obsessed with is almost universally absurd.

Gumball takes a talking blue cat and drops him into mundane suburban situations — school, grocery stores, family dinners — and lets chaos unfold. The show regularly breaks the fourth wall, mixes animation styles mid-scene, and constructs plots that make no logical sense on the surface. Underneath the chaos, it deals with real themes: social anxiety, family dynamics, peer pressure, the fear of being ordinary.

Adventure Time built an entire universe out of candy people, sentient video game consoles, and a stretchy yellow dog — and used that universe to explore grief, identity, mortality, and the nature of consciousness. Kids who watched it didn't know they were engaging with philosophy. They just thought it was weird and funny and they couldn't stop watching.

Chowder turned a cooking apprenticeship into visual surrealism. Characters regularly acknowledge they're in a cartoon. The animation medium itself becomes part of the joke. And kids followed along with sophisticated narrative structures because the absurdity kept them from ever feeling like they were being taught something.

These shows aren't successful despite being weird. They're successful because they're weird. The absurdity is the delivery mechanism for complex ideas that would bore kids in a straightforward format. The creators of these shows understand something that most educational designers don't: you don't earn a child's attention by being clear and serious. You earn it by being surprising enough that they want to find out what happens next.

Applying this to learning environments

If absurdity works as a delivery mechanism in entertainment, the question is whether it transfers to education. Based on what I'm observing, it does — but only when the absurdity is structural, not decorative.

What I mean by that: sticking a cartoon character on a worksheet doesn't make it absurd. It makes it a worksheet with a cartoon character on it. The underlying experience — read the problem, compute the answer, move to the next one — is unchanged. The child's brain still recognizes the frame as "school" and responds accordingly.

Structural absurdity means the silliness is embedded in the task itself. The problem is funny. The challenge is weird. The context is unpredictable. Here's what that looks like in practice:

A traditional vocabulary exercise asks kids to match words with definitions. A structurally absurd version asks kids to write the most ridiculous sentence they can using all five vocabulary words. The learning objective is identical — the child has to understand meaning, context, and syntax to complete the task. But the frame has shifted from "prove you memorized this" to "make something funny with this." One triggers performance anxiety. The other triggers creative energy. The cognitive work is the same.

A traditional history lesson on trade routes explains how goods moved between civilizations. A structurally absurd version gives kids a pile of ridiculous objects — an invisible sandwich, three magic rocks, a hat that makes you sneeze — and asks them to barter with each other. They're learning the same economic principles — scarcity, value, negotiation — but through an experience that feels like a game rather than a lecture.

A traditional science assignment asks kids to label the steps of photosynthesis. A structurally absurd version asks them to explain photosynthesis to an alien who has never seen a plant, has no concept of sunlight, and communicates exclusively through interpretive dance. The child has to understand the concept deeply enough to translate it into a completely different context — which is a higher-order cognitive skill than labeling a diagram.

In every case, the absurdity isn't lowering the bar. It's changing the door. The child walks through a different entrance and arrives at the same understanding — but they arrive engaged, laughing, and wanting to do it again.

The emotional mechanics of why this works

There's a deeper layer here that goes beyond attention and novelty. Absurdity creates psychological safety.

One of the most consistent findings in my research is that children disengage from learning not because the material is too hard, but because the consequences of being wrong feel too heavy. A child who's afraid of getting a math problem wrong will avoid the problem entirely — choose a lower difficulty level, rush through without thinking, or simply shut down. The fear isn't about the math. It's about the social and emotional cost of failure in an environment that treats mistakes as deficiencies.

Silliness dissolves that fear. A child who's afraid of getting a math problem wrong is not afraid of getting a joke wrong. The stakes feel different. If you wrap a multiplication problem inside a joke about a pizza slice trying to do a backflip, the child isn't performing anymore — they're playing. And play is the one context where mistakes are not only tolerated but expected. You mess up, you laugh, you try again. The cognitive work is identical. The emotional container around it has completely changed.

This is why Micah builds quizzes about farts instead of trains. It's not immaturity. It's self-protective engineering. He's instinctively constructing an emotional environment where it's safe to think hard, get things wrong, and try again — because the whole thing is funny, so nothing is at stake. He's designing his own psychological safety net, and he's doing it at eight years old without anyone teaching him to.

What educational design gets wrong

The instinct in most educational design is to make content clean, structured, and serious. This comes from a reasonable place — the belief that learning is important and should be treated with appropriate gravity. But that belief produces environments optimized for the comfort of adults, not the engagement of children.

When we strip humor out of learning materials, we're not making them more rigorous. We're making them more sterile. And sterility is the fastest path to disengagement for a child whose brain is wired to seek out novelty, surprise, and pattern-breaking.

The shows kids love understand this. The games kids play understand this. The jokes kids tell each other on the playground understand this. The only institution that doesn't seem to understand it is the one that's supposed to be designed for learning.

I'm not arguing that every lesson should be a comedy routine. I'm arguing that the emotional tone of a learning environment matters as much as the content being delivered — and that absurdity, humor, and playful weirdness are legitimate pedagogical tools, not distractions to be managed.

What I'm testing next

My current research is moving from observation into active experimentation. I'm designing learning activities where absurdity is built into the structure — outdoor challenges where the scenarios are intentionally ridiculous, collaborative games where the constraints are weird on purpose, creative exercises where the only rule is that the output has to be as strange as possible while still being accurate.

The hypothesis is simple: if you make the wrapper absurd and keep the content rigorous, children will engage deeper, retain more, and voluntarily push themselves harder than they would in a traditional format. Micah already proved this in miniature with his fart quiz. The question is whether it scales — whether you can design entire learning experiences around this principle and see the same results across different ages, subjects, and settings.

Early signals say yes. But the work isn't done. It's barely started.

Try this

Take something a child in your life is currently learning. Any subject, any grade level. Now take the same concept and make it as weird, gross, or absurd as you can without changing the underlying learning objective.

Turn a subtraction problem into a story about a dragon who keeps losing socks. Turn a grammar exercise into a competition to write the sentence that makes the teacher laugh the hardest. Turn a geography lesson into a fake travel show hosted by a talking backpack.

Then watch two things: how fast they engage, and how long they stay engaged.

You'll notice something. The child who "can't focus" suddenly can. The child who "doesn't like math" is suddenly doing math voluntarily. The child who "won't participate" is suddenly the loudest voice in the room.

Nothing changed about the child. You just gave them permission to laugh while they learn. And it turns out, that's all most of them ever needed.