Beyond Laughter: Attending to the Relational, Temporal and Structural Contexts of Everyday Family Humour Practices in the UK

Humour plays a multifaceted role in UK family life, particularly during challenging times. While it can be a valuable intersubjective tool for coping, this paper suggests that humour’s use and effectiveness is deeply entangled with relational, temporal, and structural factors. Drawing on theories of ambivalence in family and humour studies, alongside conceptualisations of affective practices and affective atmospheres, this paper explores how families deal with tensions and foster laughter through everyday struggles. The paper presents three case studies drawn from a Leverhulme Trust funded study of 25 families in the UK, utilising video ethnography and in-depth interviews to explore everyday humour use amongst families in challenging contexts. The first case relates the intensification of parenting to commonly-felt pressures to maintain laughter-filled atmospheres. The second explores the effect of relational histories and the connection between felt ‘time pressures’ and ‘forced fun’ in the midst of a family member’s health scare. The third illustrates the interplay between structural constraints and attempts at levity in a family navigating socioeconomic and racialised inequalities. Offering a critical perspective on the role of humour in family life, this paper argues that attending to the economic, societal and familial relationalities surrounding humour use reveals its potential complicity in perpetuating difficult situations. While not wishing to completely discount the positive potentials of humour, the paper asserts that vaunting it as an unproblematic means to cope overlooks the need to address broader social injustices that affect everyday family life – issues that require more radical and, perhaps, less humorous solutions.