Across (2-year) Action and Verbal studies, parents pretended, joked, and interacted literally with younger and older toddlers, whilst using (overstated) low-level communicative (or referential) cues with the former. Parents overdrew Infant-Directed Speech (IDS), and sometimes smiling, when joking or pretending, to utter positive emotion. For younger toddlers, parents enhanced gaze and smiling when joking as compared to pretend and literal contexts, possibly to demand attention to sustain joke comprehension. Parents lowered gaze to objects when joking, probably to evade toddlers generalizing jokes’ untrue information, following pedagogy theory. Younger toddlers replied fitly to these cues, pointing out how toddlers could tell apart joke intentions from other acts. Parents and toddlers handled pretending as literal. In the older group, parents and toddlers did not differentiate contexts, maybe because older toddlers reckon on refined cues, e.g., language, over the explored low-level ones.