AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

This paper responds to research in early child development on children’s ability to distinguish pretending from joking. These are interestingly related activities, as both engage children with atypical behaviour and speech: stimuli that in some way depart from how things are or should be. The research suggests that in learning to distinguish pretending and joking, children are learning to adopt quite different relations to norms. I will extrapolate from this suggestion, considering it as a route into understanding the norms and norm-violations that matter to sustaining a practice of fiction. On the view I am trying out, the fictional and the humorous do not smoothly and straightforwardly combine (even though it is wonderful to combine them). I will illustrate these claims with some examples of comic fiction that show the fictional and the funny putting norm-related pressure on each other. This discussion will also benefit from reflection on Tom Cochrane’s work on the limitations of humour.