The Anxious Laughter of Silly Songs

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

Creative Agency and Play in Design-Based Games

Review of: Dreams. Media Molecule, 2020. Super Mario Maker 2. Nintendo, 2019

Children’s Books and Colour Ecstasy: Humans’ Disconnection from Nature and What We Should Do About It

Review of: Gamblin, Kate Moss. Lake: A See to Learn Book. Illustrated by Karen Patkau, Groundwood, 2020.  Lebeuf, Darren. My Forest Is Green. Illustrated by Ashley Barron, Kids, 2019. Lebeuf, Darren. My Ocean Is Blue. Illustrated by Ashley Barron, Kids, 2020.  Ryan, Candace. Red Light, Green Lion. Illustrated by Jennifer Yerkes, Kids, 2019. Weisman, Kay. If You Want to Visit a Sea Garden. Illustrated by Roy Henry Vickers, Groundwood, 2020

Blood in the Water: Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Bayou Magic as Children’s Petrofiction

Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Bayou Magic (2015), written in the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill, deliberates the special problem of talking to children about oil. How does one tackle the subject of oil when addressing young people? How are children enabled to participate in discourses on petroleum? The novel also reveals a dilemma: the resource that we associate with comfort and progress actually contaminates, wounds, and lays waste to natural and human ecosystems. Caught in the mucky conundrum of oil, Bayou Magic reveals the challenges of talking to children about oil and oil catastrophes. In striving to meet the expectation that children’s fiction should offer a hopeful, if not happy, ending, Bayou Magic resorts to a resolution that “contains” the oil spill but sidesteps the problem of our persisting dependence on oil. But the novel’s allusion to the African deity Mami Wata is significant, as the figure connects the oppression of Black peoples to the exploitation of natural resources. As such, the novel uses fantastical elements not to imply that only something magical or divine can save us from disaster; rather, it signals that projects of environmental justice require openness to and embrace of radically imaginative solutions.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.0.001

An Analysis of Humorous Devices in Picture Books: A Pictorial Article

The purpose of this pictorial paper is to demonstrate types of humour found in picture books and how the characteristics of the picture book are deployed in their execution. It was deemed necessary to demonstrate these forms of humour, as opposed to purely analysing existing instances of such humour, to allow the reader the opportunity to experience comic amusement. Therefore, this paper is written and illustrated in the manner of a picture book, using the convention of the form, such as characters, setting and word/image interplay. It is imperative that this paper should be read as a picture book would, with the reader considering both words and pictures together simultaneously and extracting meaning from their experience of the two working together. Please continue to turn the pages and wait for your lecturer to arrive

Young Banyumasan Street Traders as Shapeshifters of Modernity: Refreshment, Production, and the Pursuit of Pranks and Jokes in Jakarta

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

The Social and Historical Effects of Laughter in Revolutionary Ireland: The Case of Our Boys

This article examines the social and historical effects of laughter as stimulated by and depicted in Our Boys in the crucial years leading up to the Anglo-Irish War. Our Boys was a juvenile periodical edited by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, who aimed to teach Irish youth how to behave and articulate their interests within the terms of reference established by nationalist, Catholic discourse. Laughter was provoked and represented in Our Boys with this objective in mind and thus came to possess a formative and ideological dimension. The investigation focuses on how laughter in the periodical constructed both ideologies and subjectivities

Teaching Resources for the Apocalypse

Review of: Cadden, Mike, Karen Coats, and Roberta Seelinger Trites, eds. Teaching Young Adult Literature. Modern Language Association of America, 2020

Le rire : formes et fonctions du comique dans la fiction africaine pour la jeunesse

Cet article étudie les différentes manifestations du comique ainsi que leurs fonctions dans quatre œuvres 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