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There’s nothing funny about human suffering. Yet, even in the direst of circumstances, people find space for laughter. And not just dark or gallows humour at that. Much of the joking that happens in refugee camps, disaster zones, and conflict areas is people teasing one another, making puns, doing impressions, telling terrible stories, laughing at bureaucracy, or making fun of themselves.
Little of this is ever reflected in media stories or humanitarian agency reports. In these, the emotional register available to people in crisis is narrow and almost entirely dour, horrific, and reactive. They grieve, endure, and survive. They demonstrate resilience, show courage, and cling to hope.
In these stories, people only respond to the crisis, confirming it as the organising principle of their entire existence. Nobody – in this telling at least – is witty or has good timing, or is the one cracking everyone else up with their impressions.
Anyone who has spent time in a camp, a registration queue, a conflict zone, or a disaster-affected neighbourhood knows this is false. People joke constantly – about humanitarian agencies, about each other, about the absurdity of the forms, about the war. Aid workers cultivate their own – sometimes dark – humour and carefully cut it before the report goes out. Everyone involved knows the laughter is there, but more often than not they choose to ignore it.
Some academics have taken notice though.
In her paper Laughable Borders, Anja Franck observes that migration scholarship has centred its analysis so completely on suffering and tragedy that migrants appear as people without laughter, irony, or play – and this is not without consequence. She writes that the “failure to recognise migrants as humorous individuals risks feeding into processes of exceptionalisation and de-humanisation through setting “the migrant” up as an obscure figure that lacks “essentially human qualities”.
This is clear when images of refugees smiling, laughing, and taking selfies on safe arrival at European shores are presumed to be evidence that they are not “real” refugees. As Franck notes, “the refugee body itself is marked as “wounded” in order for it to be legible. In fact, it still seems to be quite puzzling when refugees “don’t look like refugees”.
It’s not just about coping, it’s who people are
Laura Martin’s ethnography of Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic takes the argument about the place of humour in crises further still. Rather than treating humour as something people resorted to despite the Ebola crisis, she argues that it became a productive way of understanding it. Jokes negotiated uncertainty, reconfigured relationships, tested the meaning of new emergency rules, and, later, helped people reframe their memories of the epidemic. Humour, in short, became one of the ways that people understood and navigated the crisis.
None of this is unique.
Andrew Hernann’s study of displaced Timbuktians during the occupation of northern Mali shows joking becoming an unofficial form of political commentary. And Jennifer Fluri’s work on Afghanistan examines humour under conditions of chronic precarity.
The anthropological groundwork is older still. Alfred Radcliffe-Brown's 1940 account of joking relationships described ritualised mockery as a way societies manage relationships of structural inequality without disavowing them.
People in crises don’t just joke as a response to the tragedy that has befallen them. Humour is part of who they are – and that distinction matters.
Taken together, this is a substantial body of evidence that humour is integral to how crises are lived, interpreted, and remembered. And this goes beyond its relegation to simply a coping or resistance mechanism. Yes, humour can help relieve pressure, build solidarity, and restore dignity. It can also smuggle criticism past authority in a form not easily punished, as practised by Hernann's displaced Timbuktians and countless political cartoonists and satirists working under authoritarian regimes.
But people in crises don’t just joke as a response to the tragedy that has befallen them. Humour is part of who they are – and that distinction matters.
Making a joke requires timing, judgement, an ear for absurdity, a sense of audience, and a shared world rich enough for the reference to land. Humour presupposes an interior life and a social one: a personality, a reputation among friends, favourite stories, and particular ways of seeing the world that predate – and are not defined by – the crisis. Simply put, to see people in crises as funny is to see them as human beings with lives that exceed their circumstances.
Contrast this with humanitarianism’s favourite compliment: resilient. It genuinely admires the person – but only by tethering them to the catastrophe. Humour cuts the tether. To describe someone as funny is to acknowledge a life that exceeds the emergency.
Humourless fits the bill for the sector
There is a blunt institutional reason humour disappears from humanitarian communication. Funny people are difficult to save, and the humanitarian appeal has been based on a simplistic moral model of suffering, powerless victims, and heroic, self-sacrificing saviours driven by pity and charity. Humour subverts that. It is not easy to pity the funny.
That helps explain why humanitarian institutions readily use humour when they want communities to change behaviour. During the Ebola epidemic, Sierra Leonean comedians were employed to communicate public health advice because humour made messages memorable and reduced fear.
The sector recognises humour when it serves its goals, and when it is non-threatening. Parodies such as Radi-Aid and my own satirical inversions for The New Humanitarian can circulate within the sector but they should not be confused for a challenge to power.
This does not mean that humanitarian reporting needs to resemble comedy writing. What it needs to do is to stop deleting the humour it already finds and to lose its fear of it.
They serve the role of the court jester, who, though seen as a figure speaking truth to power, was part of the court and thus part of power. It was power laughing at truth, rather than a mechanism for subversion. This has its own value but should not be confused for the real subversion that could be achieved by treating people in crises as fully human. However, like the king at court, humanitarians would rather embrace the jester as a substitute for embracing the people.
The sector is much less comfortable with the notion of funny “beneficiaries” that threatens its own power.
Anthropologists Didier Fassin and Miriam Ticktin have shown how humanitarian compassion recognises suffering only in particular forms. The memes highlighted by Franck that interpreted laughter as evidence of fraud were applying a similar logic.
This does not mean that humanitarian reporting needs to resemble comedy writing. What it needs to do is to stop deleting the humour it already finds and to lose its fear of it. If an interviewee is witty, report that she is witty. If a community has a running joke, print it. If people laugh while discussing the bureaucracy running their lives, let readers hear that laughter.
None of this trivialises suffering. But it does reject the idea that suffering diminishes the humanity of those who experience it: A humanitarianism that cannot recognise humour as a form of knowledge will always understand the crises better than it understands the people living through them.
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