ABSTRACT
Since 9/11, Muslims have been increasingly characterised as lacking a sense of humour, where humour is taken as a sign of the human. In response, like writers from other marginalised or othered groups, a new generation of Pakistani anglophone writers has adopted benign humour as a form of resistance and challenge to domination, as a sign and reassertion of humanity, resilience, intelligence, and as a way to build community and foster rethinking. Drawing on critical humour theory, this essay closely analyses two novels – H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy and Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes – to show how each deploys different strategies and forms of humour to do serious political and cultural work.
