Includes bibliographical references and index.

Smiling in the face of adversity: how to use humour to defuse cultural conflict / Ulrike Erichsen -- 'Laughing through the tears': mockery and self-representation in V.S. Naipaul's A house for Mr Biswas and Earl Lovelace's The dragon can't dance / Anthony Ilona -- Laughter and aggression: desire and derision in a postcolonial context / Virginia Richter -- Humouring the terrorists or the terrorised? Militant Muslims in Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi / Helga Ramsey-Kurz -- Postcolonial laughter in Canada: Mordecai Richler's The incomparable Atuk / Heinz Antor -- The colonizer's gift of cursing: satire in David Foster's Moonlite / Susan Lever -- Swift and Sterne revisited: postcolonial parodies in Rushdie and Singh-Toor / Michael Meyer -- After-laughter, or the comedy of decline: Ronald Searle's critique of postwar Englishness in The rake's progress / Detlef Gohrbandt.

Queer laughter: Shyam Selvadurai's Funny boy and the normative as comic / Mita Banerjee -- 'I was born in East L.A.': humour and the displacement of nationality and ethnicity / Astrid Fellner/Klaus Heissenberger -- 'The sketch's the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the audience': strategies and pitfalls of ethnic TV comedies in Britain, the United States, and Germany / Christiane Schlote -- Worlds apart: schools in postcolonial Indian fiction / Margit Ozvalda -- Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo's Sour sweet / Susanne Pichler -- What makes an accent funny, and why? black British Englishes and humour televised / Susanne Mühleisen -- 'Ethnic glue': humour in Native American literatures / Maggie Ann Bowers -- Using a comic vision to contend with tragedy: three unusual African English novels / Annie Gagiano -- Madam & Eve--ten wonderful years: a cartoon strip and its role in post-apartheid South Africa / Gisela Feurle -- Laughing back at the kingfisher: Zakes Mda's The heart of redness and postcolonial humour / Wendy Woodward.