It's no coincidence I started blogging about this as Master turns four. Previously he was too young to put forward his opinions on much, but nowadays he provides them in great detail whether we like it or not. Melissa asked some great questions on the last post about what happens when the kids don't want to live where the parents do. We often hear certain places being touted as great for specific agegroups. This place is ideal for young families. Another is great for retirees. A third is exciting (yet affordable) for teens and twenty-somethings, and so on and so forth. In some ways we are unique like snowflakes, and in other ways we are products of our generation or the biology and influences inherent to our current stage of life.

What happens when the kids want to live in one place, and the adults another? When I was a child I begged my parents to find a job in an exciting foreign location. I guess it wasn't as easy in those days, but my mother maintained that it would have been possible, except they thought it was "best for us kids" to stay put. No matter how many times I assured her we truly wanted to spend a year or more living in Birmingham or Dallas or Wellington like friend X, Y or Z, they utterly failed to pack us up and move us anywhere. Until I was sixteen. Then they packed us up and moved us to the next suburb, but nobody even had to change schools.

They still live in that same house today. My parents have lived in a total of three houses each their whole lives (the second two being common to both lists) and this is not likely to change. My sisters and I, on the other hand, flew the coop rather magnificently on reaching adulthood, and all of us now have to take planes to get home. I wonder how much of that was a reaction to the extreme geographical stability of our youths? I wonder how my children will react if I provide them with the opposite lifestyle?

Looking back, I don't think it was as simple as my parents deciding to put their nomadic dreams aside on the assumption that us kids wouldn't like moving - or at least that's what I'd like to think because, gosh, what an idiotic situation that would have been. I think there were a complex network of reasons for their choice, from my father's decision to be content with a humble role which allowed him to come home each night for dinner, to thoughts of my grandparents' health and (once my grandfather died) loneliness.

I'm wondering how your childhood experiences of moving - or not moving - affected your adult decisions to move or stay put? And I'm wondering which places are the most welcoming of all agegroups - young and old.

"Dad, he reckons powerlines are a reminder of man's ability to generate electricity." (Dale Kerrigan, The Castle)

I've been thinking some more about what's funny. Today, as usual, I dropped the Young Master off at kindy, and walked his sixteen-inch child's bike back down the hill towards home, steering it by the handlebars. Master's school unfortunately does not have a bike rack, but letting him wear his dress-up aviator's cap and ride his bike - sorry, fly his aeroplane - is still the most pleasant way of getting him there. Steering the riderless contraption home and then back again afterwards is a small price to pay for a ten minute journey spent singing Those Magnificent Men versus a thirty minute journey spent moaning, whining, cajoling, threatening and weeping. Nevertheless, I still sometimes garner expressions of friendly sympathy from passersby as I try to stop it running away from me down the hill, and today was such an occasion.

"If only it was expandable!" the Singaporean woman in question said. "Then you could let your son ride it to school, and expand it into a big bike so you can ride it home again."

"That would be useful," I agreed. "Or maybe I could just buy a rainbow wig and some oversized shoes."

She hesitated awkwardly, her friendly smile frozen on her face. So I laughed at my own joke, which kind of made me feel like a dick, but less of a dick than I would have felt just standing there listening to the crickets chirp, punctuated by a lone cough. "Oh!" she resumed. "Because then you'd look like a clown, and you'd match the very small-sized bike!"

"Yes!" I affirmed, and we both laughed together, but more out of relief than anything else.

This happens to me all the time. At home, a joke like that would have been rewarded with an instant laugh. (Actually, a roll of the eyes and a shake of the head is more likely, and yet still more gratifying.) When you move away from where you grew up - even if it's not all that far or all that different, but especially if it is - you do expect to have trouble communicating with those around you. What I didn't expect was how much I'd miss having my jokes understood, most of the time.

"What were his eyes like?"
"They were... melancholy." (Big Train, Police Artist Sketch)

Some things about humour are universal. It is easier to laugh at yourself than at other people. Or rather, it's easier to get other people to laugh at you, than at themselves, or third parties. Or rather, I should say, you are less likely to offend the people who are not laughing if you have made the joke at your own expense. There are no guarantees with this, however, and there are fewer guarantees when you have identified yourself as part of a larger group - people from region X, or thirty-something females; followers of this religion, or infertility patients who have recently experienced miscarriage, and it depends also on how you choose to structure your joke. But there is humour everywhere - yes, everywhere, written here by someone who made a number of jokes about her own miscarriages - if you know how to use it, and I think it is a great gift to be able to. In fact, if I sit down and list off the things I want for Master, as his parent, I would not start with "to be happy" or "to be comfortably well-off" or "to be well educated" but I would write "to be able to laugh. To be able to recognise a joke and make one. To be able to make others laugh with him.

"To be able to laugh together."

And if we were at "home" he would pick up the necessary tools through ordinary observation and maybe another thousand or so incessant questions about why so and so found such and such that darned hilarious. But we are not at home. We are in a place where, when I make witty remarks to locals about rainbow wigs and oversized shoes, I get awkward pauses followed by relieved laughter - if I'm lucky. Often it's just me and the crickets.

 "Look - no cars, no police, also no government. Just walk, okay!"
"Stop! Hands Up!" (Lim/policemen, Just Follow Law)

There is an opportunity here to increase and expand our ability to use humour. To see the funny side of more things, to understand more jokes, to laugh more often at a broader range of circumstances. But there is a danger also of letting our jocularity wither for lack of the right kind of feedback. Of inventing lists of nationalities that "don't have a sense of humour" or "wouldn't know a joke unless it hit them on the head", when nothing could be further from the truth.

So I'm looking for the answer. The universal rules. The right body language, perhaps, or facial expressions. Whatever tools I need to keep the laughter alive. And if you have any suggestions, please leave them!

Humour is tricky. Parody is trickier. I once watched a documentary about a Korean-Dutch comedian who took his show back to his parents' North Korea, where the authorities changed everything "to make it more presentable to a Korean audience". I wasn't entirely sure who was being offended by whom, much of the time, but I'm pretty sure both, and everyone. Comedians will tell you being funny is like that. Jenny Allen has certainly experienced it this week with her piece I'm A Mom, which didn't appeal to Pamela of Silent Sorority, amongst others. This surprised me - not the lack of appeal, per se, but her eventual reaction to it - because the message Jenny and Pamela are trying to convey are so much the same. (Here is what Pam wrote about the infamous Anne Romney mum-speech.)

Humour is tricky. There is a cliche in the world that Americans have no sense of humour, which is, of course, outrageously untrue (example: Jenny Allen), but it is a testament to the delicacy of humour that it can be so hard to deliver across even the most subtle of cultural boundaries. I have a couple of American friends, and both of them insist on suffixing their jokes with "I'm kidding!" which, for me, not only sucks the humour out of it, but almost offends me. Where I come from, not being able to recognise or handle a bit of light-hearted joking around is a social deficiency akin to mean-spirited name-calling, or complaining loudly and repeatedly about your host's roasted pumpkin. When an American friend says, "I'm kidding!" after a joke, I hear, "I am funny, but you are socially deficient. You are probably the sort of person who gets pleasure from mean-spirited name-calling, or thinks it's ok to loudly and repeatedly criticise your host's roasted pumpkin." I have to consciously remind myself that they are actually trying to remove offense from their humour, rather than add it, and that this is probably their response to being misunderstood as expats living in a foreign culture. Then I have to forceably resume what remains of my merriment.

The whole thing is topical for us at the moment. Lately, whenever we laugh, The Young Master wants to know why it's funny. This morning I laughed because when (for the forty-third time) I released the balloon I'd blown up for the purpose of releasing, it flew around and around the room and into the rubbish bin. "Um, it's, well, it's like even the balloon is tired of the game," I explained.

"I'm not tired of the game," Master replied gravely.

"Yes but... no I suppose you're not. Why don't we blow it up again?" But it was too late. I'd laughed, by my laughter and the following explanation I'd inferred that there was something funny about the fact he was still interested in the game long after everyone (including, apparently, the inanimate balloon) had ceased to be interested, and now I was locked into a discussion about the nature and meaning of humour and I had to think fast about what I wanted him to learn. Was I supposed to agree that the joke had been made in error, and promise to never joke about releasing balloons again? Would that teach him to be fearful of making jokes, which can be such a useful tool? Should I, by my example, encourage him to tack a metaphorical or actual "I'm kidding!" on to the end of every joke he makes, to ensure the listener doesn't take it too seriously, knowing that this will offend a lot of people he has to spend Christmas with? Should I demonstrate how to suck it up, push him to laugh at his own quirky determination to watch that balloon fly around the room til both his parents lie passed out on the floor from hyperventilation? Would that send an inappropriate message that I think him foolish, or that he can laugh at anyone over anything and expect them to join in?

I thought Jenny Allen's article was funny. Much funnier than a tired old balloon flying into a bin after its forty-third journey around the room, and more important, too. Through parody, she deftly exhibited not only the offensiveness of recent political speeches to women without children, but to women everywhere, whatever their choices or circumstances. It's a feminist piece, calling on politicians to speak to women as if they have a place outside the assigned role of motherhood - much as you might speak to men, regardless of their current reproductive status. She had a tightrope to walk between the too-subtle and the too-obvious, and I thought she walked it brilliantly, but not everyone agrees. Some, like Pam, think the piece doesn't push hard enough, and is in danger of being taken seriously. Of course, if mother-worship is a hot-button topic for you, it will be harder to recognise or appreciate the parody. Your buttons will have been triggered and your anger will already be high before the writer smirks, metaphorically speaking, and as a result the joke will be lost much more easily.

Humour is tricky, but it is also a powerful tool for facing adversity, making a point, or bridging a gap between people - even across cultural boundaries - so I really do need to know how to explain its nuances to my four year old. If you have any universal rules to throw me, I'd be most grateful.