Humour is a strictly human attribute, enjoyed and embraced by people of all ages, cultures and socioeconomic status. It is an undeniably delightful human quality that provides one with pleasure, however transient. Despite its amusing and ostensibly uncomplicated façade, when closely examined, the complexity from which laughter arises compels one to think about its paradoxically dark and solemn nature. Laughter can be a response to crisis, therefore imbued with ambivalence and nervous yet cathartic energy.
Western culture has long valorised humour as an integral part of what it is to be human and many theories have been written about it. Besides its scholarly treatment, Western culture shows no scarcity of entertainment and people's readiness to consume it in varying forms. However, due its close affiliation to popular culture—regarded as morally and intellectually secondary to traditional culture, humour is often overlooked as a trivial quality merely to provide amusement.
East Asian culture seems to exude a rather patronising view on humour. Despite their seemingly more ascetic moral code and values however, countries with deep-rooted Confucian traditions also exhibit a long history of ambivalent yet fascinating relationship between crisis and mirth. Now laced with a huge Western influence, unrelenting acceleration in technological advancement and burgeoning popular culture, what has been deemed strictly Asian and untranslatable is becoming more transcultural, thereby making once obscure culture of laughter in traditionally more serious Eastern culture more visually perceptible.
Ambivalent laughter—laughing in the face of anguish—shows how a story can be told in a different way. The narrative of people and cultures that have been ill-treated, often portrayed as pitiful, resentful and downtrodden, can be turned around with laughter—through self-deprecating and internalised humour among themselves—to tell a story of resilience, forward and upward-looking to transcend crisis.
Keywords: ambivalence, laughter, transcultural, popular culture, crisis, visual storytelling