Contents -- Introduction -- I. Laughter's double vision - Humour and cultural ambiguity -- Smiling in the face of adversity: How to use humour to defuse cultural conflict -- '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 -- Laughter and aggression: Desire and derision in a postcolonial context -- Humouring the terrorists or the terrorised? Militant Muslims in Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi -- II. Traditions and transgressions - Writing back and forth -- Postcolonial laughter in Canada: Mordecai Richler's The Incomparable Atuk -- The colonizer's gift of cursing: Satire in David Foster's Moonlite -- Swift and Sterne revisited: Postcolonial parodies in Rushdie and Singh-Toor -- After-laughter, or the comedy of decline: Ronald Searle's critique of postwar Englishness in The Rake's Progress -- III. Ethnic cabaret - A license to laugh? -- Queer laughter: Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy and the normative as comic -- 'I was born in East L.A.': Humour and the displacement of nationality and ethnicity -- '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 -- IV. The language of humour - The humour of language -- Worlds apart: Schools in postcolonial Indian fiction -- Interculturality and humour in Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet -- What makes an accent funny, and why? Black British Englishes and humour televised -- V. Laughing it off - Does therapeutic humour work? -- 'Ethnic glue': Humour in Native American literatures -- Using a comic vision to contend with tragedy: Three unusual African English novels -- Madam & Eve - Ten Wonderful Years: A cartoon strip and its role in post-apartheid South Africa.

Laughing back at the kingfisher: Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness and postcolonial humour -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z -- Contributors.