In his 2018 study How to Make Children Laugh, Michael Rosen writes that when he performs silly songs and poems in schools, “I become the channel through which the children can, for a moment, let go of their anxieties about the authority figures in their lives” (23). The laughter mediates between the norms of adulthood and the anxieties of childhood. Although silly songs are perennially popular with children and their caregivers alike, they remain understudied. This article, then, asks how laughter works in the context of English-language silly songs for preschool and early elementary children. Drawing from Rosen’s theorization, it combines the perspectives of literary studies and early childhood music education to analyze well-known silly songs recorded by Sharon, Lois & Bram, Raffi, and others. Grown-up performers invite laughter by acting like goofy big kids who can play along with the children and by inverting the authority relationship between children and adults. Silly songs create deliberately incongruous, cheekily subversive experiences that can help children’s anxieties to be released and rendered nonthreatening.

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

In this essay I discuss the Pop-Up against Coronavirus Project, initiated by the Fondazione Tancredi di Barolo based in Turin Italy. It is a research, conservation and educational foundation devoted to movable books, especially pop-up books. Their work with children is in conjunction with their museum of School and Children’s books (Museo della Scuola e del Libro per l’Infanzia). When the outbreak of the coronavirus in Italy in late February 2020 prevented the academic conference they had organized from occurring, the foundation immediately turned their attention to working cross culturally with and for children, engaging Italian, Chinese and later Dutch artists and paper engineers to devise working models of different types of pop-ups. I give an account of the inception of the project, discuss the materials provided on their site, and examine some of the images of the homemade artifacts made by children and their families in Italy and China.

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

This article reads the comedic after-school special John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch (Netflix 2019) alongside philosophical accounts of humour, comedy, and laughter—collectively, Humour—and elaborates upon how Sack Lunch repurposes the conceptual binary of adult and child, neither reinforcing nor denying its formative role in the relationship between people of diverse ages. Interpreted as what Ludwig Wittgenstein called a grammatical investigation (or a study of how language is used), Sack Lunch inhabits the ambiguous and artificial boundary between child and adult to trouble an overly familiar picture of growing up. In showing how children’s and adults’ Humour is alike in showing what is funny, or off, in our world, Sack Lunch is a non-instrumental example of Humour as a pedagogical resource. Because it exposes the sedimented conceptions underlying how intergenerational social relationships perpetuate socio-political injustices, children’s Humour in particular warrants further attention by philosophers of humour.

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

Banyumasan Javanese people of Indonesia are often revered as funnier than other Javanese. Ethnographic accounts herein illuminate how young, Banyumasan street traders in Jakarta perform and participate in laughing, joking, and pranking at work. Intersectional analysis reveals the utility of joking and pranking as heuristics to understand the affective dimensions of status, stigmatization, migrating for work, and growing up in Indonesia. The polysemic nature of jokes and pranks reference camaraderie and othering, incongruities and expectations, agency and oppression, as well as intersubjective relations between young men at work. This view of Banyumasan street traders as urban jokers and jesters, producing and consuming humour “from below” for and about each other, departs from previous scholarship on humour in Java, which has focused on how clown characters in staged shadow puppet (wayang kulit) performances have asserted and perpetuated inequalities through a refined-unrefined (halus-kasar) binary whereby those deemed kasar are seen as lacking something. This article, in contrast, asserts the utility of jokes and pranks to refreshing and regenerating understandings of kasar, what it is to be human, and the temporalities, spatialities, and intersubjectivities of boys growing up and working in Indonesia’s street economy.

This article is a description of and a reflection upon the development of a gamification project on humour. Its creation was originally undertaken in collaboration with three students in the Intercultural Management (ICM) program at the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France: Keizo Suzuki from Japan, Aigerim Daribayeva from Kazakhstan, and Stephan van de Ven from the Netherlands. This diverse team, in a for-credit project as part of their ICM master’s program, worked under the direction of David Bousquet, who, with his colleague Alex Frame, had already supervised student teams on similar projects developing other games that have been published and are now being used for both organizational training and academic courses. These projects were accomplished in collaboration with George Simons International, a sole proprietorship that initiated the diversophy® game series and which provided coaching, editing, and final production. After concluding this project, and in preparation for writing this article, Suzuki, Daribayeva, Van de Ven, and Bousquet were asked to provide a brief report of their insights and learning as well as to describe some of their experiences in conceiving, planning, and implementing the humour project. These reflections are interspersed throughout the article.

Cet article étudie les différentes manifestations du comique ainsi que leurs fonctions dans quatre oeuvres fictionnelles pour la jeunesse en Afrique : l’album Tout Rond de Fatou Keïta et les romans Les confidences de Médor de Micheline Coulibaly, Pain sucré de Mary Lee Martin-Koné et Awa la petite marchande de Nafissatou Niang Diallo. Il part de l’idée que l’inscription du rire dans la littérature d’enfance et de jeunesse participe de sa dimension didactique, mais produit également une expérience esthétique. À travers l’analyse des rires moqueurs des personnages, il met particulièrement en évidence des conditions dans lesquelles la dérision apparaît légitime, inévitable, excluant l’Autre ou révélatrice de la profondeur du psychisme humain.

Notre contribution à ce numéro spécial sur le rire relève de la didactique de la littérature jeunesse. Notre objectif vise à présenter une grille détaillée des procédés humoristiques adoptés par divers auteurs et illustrateurs en les exemplifiant par des extraits tirés des textes et des illustrations de plusieurs albums. Ce qui nous a conduits à développer cette grille, c’est la constatation lors d’observations ethnographiques dans des classes du primaire de l’attrait des élèves envers les procédés humoristiques (Montésinos-Gelet), mais également du peu de mots dont ils disposent pour les décrire avec précision et ainsi mieux les apprécier. Nous avons donc recensé plusieurs catégorisations et nous sommes appuyées sur les six attraits du livre proposés par Joyce G. Saricks pour organiser notre grille. Nous avons ajouté deux attraits pour tenir compte des illustrations. Nous avons ainsi dégagé et catégorisé quatre registres dans lesquels se déploient onze types d’humour ainsi que douze variétés de comique auxquelles sont associés quarante-sept procédés.