This book engages anthropologically with humor as political expression. It reveals how humor is in many instances at the center of human efforts to cope with political struggle and a significant key to understanding power dynamics in socio-political life. The chapters examine humor and joking activities across a diverse range of geographic areas and cultural contexts. The contributors consider humor as it is constituted in political anxiety, aggression and power, and when it becomes a tool to resist, repair, reconcile or make a moral claim. Collectively they demonstrate that humor can provide a powerful critique, a non-violent form of political protest and the space for restoration of human dignity.

Introduction

1.You've Got to be Joking: Asserting the Analytical Value of Humor and Laughter in Contemporary Anthropology

2. Disaster Humor in an Age of Truth-bending Politics

3. "Joke" Elections: Satirical Activism and Political Opposition in Lithuania

4.When the Fearful Becomes Funny: Joke-Work in the Midst of Violence

5. Humor Against Forgetting: Joking in the Space of Death

6. Chisasibi Cree Hunters and Missionaries: Humor as Evidence of Tension

7. Mexican Speech Play: History and the Psychological Discourses of Power

8. The Flesh of Joking Relationships: A Study of Quechua Sexual Farce

9. Trickster In The Mirror of Play and Anthropological Imagination

10. Trump's Two Bodies: The Trickster-Wrestler as a Political Type

11. "An Army of Comedy": Political Jokes and Tropic Ambiguity in the Trump Era

Afterword: Not All Fun and Games: The Force of Humor in Political Life

Jana Kopelent Rehak is a Researcher in Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA and Lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.

Susanna Trnka is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.