There is an old saying, sometimes attributed to anonymous wisdom and sometimes to the collective inheritance of Black American culture: “Got to laugh to keep from crying.” It is a sentence that contains an entire philosophy of survival. It acknowledges the pain. It does not deny the crying. And it insists, with quiet defiance, that laughter is not the opposite of suffering but a parallel response to it—a way of bearing what cannot be changed while maintaining the will to keep going.

Throughout history, marginalized communities have developed rich, sophisticated, and distinctive humor traditions—not as a luxury or a distraction, but as a necessity. These traditions serve functions that mainstream humor scholarship has only recently begun to appreciate fully: they preserve dignity in the face of dehumanization, build solidarity among people who share experiences of exclusion, transmit cultural knowledge across generations, process collective trauma, and carve out psychological space in a world that often denies marginalized people the right to define their own reality.

This chapter examines how humor has functioned as a survival tool in three broad communities—Black and other communities of color, LGBTQ+ communities, and immigrant communities—while recognizing that these categories overlap in countless ways. Many people navigate multiple marginalized identities simultaneously, and their humor reflects the complexity of living at those intersections. The goal is not a comprehensive history of humor in each community—entire libraries could be written about each—but an exploration of what this humor reveals about resilience, mental health, and the human capacity to find meaning in adversity.

Black Humor: From the Dozens to Dave Chappelle

The tradition of Black American humor is one of the richest and most influential in world culture, and it was born from one of history’s greatest atrocities. Harvard scholar Glenda Carpio, in her landmark study Laughing Fit to Kill, traces Black humor back to the antebellum period, demonstrating how enslaved people developed modes of comedic expression—irony, satire, the grotesque, the absurd—as what she calls “rituals of redress.” These were not merely coping strategies. They were acts of resistance: ways of maintaining an internal life, a sense of selfhood and community, under conditions designed to strip both away.

The tradition runs through specific cultural forms that have no true equivalent in mainstream American culture. Signifying—the art of indirect, layered communication in which what is said is not exactly what is meant, and the pleasure lies in the gap between the two—is a rhetorical tradition with roots in West African oral culture that permeates Black humor to this day. Playing the dozens, a tradition of ritualized verbal combat in which participants exchange increasingly creative and outrageous insults (often targeting the opponent’s family members), serves multiple functions simultaneously: it develops verbal agility, tests emotional resilience, establishes social hierarchy through wit rather than violence, and builds community through shared laughter.

As Carpio argues, modern Black comedy is deeply indebted to these traditions even when it does not explicitly reference them. Richard Pryor’s groundbreaking stand-up, which transformed American comedy in the 1970s, drew on signifying, the dozens, and the Black oral tradition of toasting to create a comedic style that was radically vulnerable and radically honest. Pryor’s humor did not mask aggression behind jokes in the Freudian sense; it relished both the exposure and the aggression, creating a space where Black audiences could recognize their experience reflected with total authenticity and white audiences could be shocked into recognition of realities they had been sheltered from.

This tradition continued through Dick Gregory, who brought racial satire into white comedy clubs in the 1960s, forcing audiences to laugh at the absurdity of segregation; through Moms Mabley, whose persona as a toothless, lusty grandmother encoded sharp political commentary in a form that made it seem harmless; through Dave Chappelle, whose Comedy Central series deployed racial stereotypes with such exaggeration that it became impossible to maintain comfortable ignorance about the stereotypes’ existence; and through contemporary comedians who continue to use humor as what scholar J. Finley calls a tool that “enables the subversion of cultural and social norms” while sometimes also reinforcing them.

The mental health implications of this tradition are significant. Research on self-enhancing humor among Black individuals has shown that this humor style plays a particular role in facilitating positive racial identity: it helps people highlight the absurdities of prejudice, reclaim power and a sense of control during experiences of discrimination, and promote group solidarity and cultural pride. These are not merely psychological abstractions. In a society where Black Americans face chronic exposure to racial stress—from microaggressions to systemic discrimination to the threat of violence—humor that affirms identity and builds connection serves a protective function that is measurable and real.

But there is a complication that any honest account must address. The same humor that heals within the community can be appropriated by outsiders as permission to laugh at the community rather than with it. The history of American entertainment is inseparable from the history of blackface minstrelsy—a form in which white performers caricatured Black life for white audiences, transforming the richness and complexity of Black humor into crude stereotypes. This history means that Black comedians have always worked in a double bind: they must be funny enough to succeed in an industry shaped by white audiences and white gatekeepers, while remaining authentic enough to serve the community from which their humor springs—and they must do both while knowing that their material may be consumed in ways they cannot control. Chappelle’s abrupt departure from his own show in 2005, reportedly driven in part by concerns about whether white audiences were laughing with his racial satire or at Black people, illustrates the psychic cost of this bind.

LGBTQ+ Humor: Camp, Coding, and Radical Joy

If Black humor was forged in the crucible of slavery and its aftermath, LGBTQ+ humor was forged in the closet—and in the defiant act of stepping out of it. For much of modern Western history, queer people lived under conditions that criminalized their existence, pathologized their identities, and demanded their invisibility. Homosexuality was classified as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1973. Police raids on gay bars were routine. Cross-dressing was illegal in many jurisdictions. And in this climate of enforced silence, humor became what queer communities have often described as a lifeline.

The foundational mode of LGBTQ+ humor is camp: a sensibility rooted in theatricality, irony, exaggeration, and the embrace of what mainstream culture considers too much, too flamboyant, too queer. Susan Sontag famously described camp as a love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration, but for queer communities, camp has always been more than an aesthetic preference. It is a survival strategy. By embracing extravagance and artifice, camp humor subverts the very categories—natural, normal, proper—that were used to justify the exclusion and punishment of queer people. When a drag queen transforms herself into a parody of femininity so excessive it becomes sublime, she is not merely entertaining. She is demonstrating that the categories of gender themselves are performances—and that the people who enforce those categories with violence and exclusion are, in a fundamental sense, ridiculous.

Before Stonewall, much of queer humor was necessarily coded. Gay men developed elaborate systems of double entendre, euphemism, and in-group reference—a language of shared knowledge that allowed them to communicate openly in front of people who didn’t share the code. This served a practical survival function: it built community and affirmed identity without risking arrest or violence. But it also served a psychological function that researchers in minority stress would recognize immediately. Ilan Meyer’s 2003 Minority Stress Model identifies three factors that contribute to mental health disparities among LGBTQ+ people: exposure to external stressors like discrimination, the constant anticipation of those stressors, and the internalization of negative societal attitudes. Coded humor addressed all three: it created a space of safety from external threat, it transformed the exhausting vigilance of anticipation into the pleasure of shared wit, and it countered internalized stigma by asserting that queerness was not shameful but clever, not pitiable but funny.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s reshaped queer humor profoundly. In the face of unimaginable loss and governmental neglect, comedy became both a coping mechanism and a form of protest. Gallows humor, biting satire, and the defiant spectacle of drag performance became expressions of resilience. Groups like ACT UP used theatrical humor—die-ins, outrageous street theater, pointed slogans—to force public attention to a crisis that the government was willing to ignore. The humor was not a retreat from the horror. It was a refusal to let the horror be the only story.

Kate Clinton, one of the first openly lesbian stand-up comedians, pioneered politically charged queer humor in the 1980s, tackling feminism, AIDS, and LGBTQ+ rights with a wit that educated as much as it entertained. Robin Tyler, whom Rebecca Krefting highlights as a crucial figure in charged humor, used comedy as a platform for LGBTQ+ visibility decades before such visibility was mainstream. Ellen DeGeneres brought queer humor to a massive television audience in the 1990s, blending vulnerability with comedy in ways that normalized queer identity even as it cost her professionally. And Hannah Gadsby, as we have explored in earlier chapters, used comedy to interrogate the very terms on which marginalized comedians are permitted to be funny.

Today, queer humorists embrace a wider array of identities and experiences than ever before. Comedians like Bowen Yang, Joel Kim Booster, and Sam Jay bring intersectional perspectives that address racism, fetishization, and cultural expectations within and beyond the LGBTQ+ community. Their humor reflects a generation that refuses to simplify its identity for the comfort of any single audience—and in doing so, it models a kind of psychological wholeness that mental health professionals would recognize as deeply therapeutic: the integration of multiple aspects of self into a coherent, publicly expressed identity.

Immigrant Humor: Translating Between Worlds

For immigrant communities, humor occupies a unique position at the crossroads of languages, cultures, and identities. Immigration is, among many other things, a comedic situation—a sustained experience of incongruity in which the rules you learned in one world collide constantly with the rules of another. The foods are wrong. The social cues are unreadable. The things that were serious back home are funny here, and the things that are deadly serious here seem baffling. Many immigrant comedians have observed that the immigrant experience is inherently absurd—and that absurdity, channeled through humor, becomes a powerful tool for processing dislocation and building new forms of belonging.

Research on acculturative stress—the chronic strain of adapting to a new cultural environment—has found that humor plays a significant role in buffering its effects on mental health. As we explored in the chapter on cultural variations, studies of mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong found that affiliative humor was particularly effective at managing acculturative stress, buffering all four types of hassles linked with depression. The social function of humor—its capacity to build bonds and create a sense of shared experience—appears to be especially valuable during cultural transition, when existing social networks have been disrupted and new ones must be built from scratch.

Immigrant humor traditions in the United States are extraordinarily diverse, reflecting the full range of cultures that have contributed to American life. Jewish American humor—perhaps the most documented immigrant humor tradition—developed specific characteristics that reflected the community’s historical experience: self-deprecation, intellectual wordplay, a tragicomic sensibility that acknowledged suffering while refusing to be defeated by it, and a deep skepticism toward authority. These qualities were not arbitrary aesthetic choices. They were adaptive responses to centuries of persecution, displacement, and the constant need to maintain internal cohesion under external threat. The tradition produced not only entertainment but also a psychological framework—a way of being in the world that prioritized wit, learning, and the ability to find absurdity in catastrophe—that many scholars have identified as a significant factor in community resilience.

Latino and Latina humor traditions bring different sensibilities shaped by different histories. The tradition of relajo—a Mexican comedic practice of deliberately disrupting solemnity and pretension—serves as a form of social critique and community bonding. Comedians like George Lopez, Cristela Alonzo, and John Leguizamo have used stand-up to explore the specific absurdities of Latino immigrant life in America: the code-switching between languages, the generational tensions between assimilation and cultural preservation, the surreal experience of being simultaneously invisible and hypervisible. Their humor does what the best immigrant humor always does: it makes the dislocations of immigration visible, shared, and bearable.

South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and African immigrant communities each bring distinctive humor traditions that are only beginning to receive scholarly attention. Comedians like Hasan Minhaj, Ali Wong, Hari Kondabolu, Trevor Noah, and Vir Das have brought the specificities of their cultural backgrounds into mainstream comedy, creating work that is simultaneously universal in its themes—family pressure, identity confusion, the absurdity of prejudice—and particular in its details. In doing so, they serve a therapeutic function for their communities that mirrors what Black and LGBTQ+ comedians have long provided: the recognition that your experience is real, it is shared, and it is not only painful but genuinely, transcendently funny.

Intersections: Where Identities Meet

The neatest categories are always the least accurate. People do not experience marginalization along a single axis. A Black queer woman navigating American life is not experiencing “Black marginalization” plus “queer marginalization” plus “gender marginalization” as separate, additive stresses. She is experiencing something specific to the intersection of all three—what legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw named intersectionality.

Scholar J. Finley’s work on Black women’s humor, culminating in her book Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity, argues that we must codify the specificity of humor at these intersections. Black women comedians—from Moms Mabley to Wanda Sykes, from Tiffany Haddish to Phoebe Robinson—develop humor that fights on multiple fronts simultaneously, addressing racism, sexism, and heteronormativity not as separate issues but as intertwined systems that produce unique experiences requiring unique comedic strategies.

Research on LGBTQ+ people of color has documented the particular stressors that arise at these intersections. Balsam and colleagues developed the LGBT People of Color Microaggressions Scale, which measures three distinctive domains of microaggression: racism within LGBTQ+ communities, heterosexism within racial and ethnic communities, and discrimination in intimate relationships. Each domain reflects a situation in which a person’s identities are in tension with the communities that should offer belonging. Humor developed at these intersections often addresses precisely this tension: the experience of being too queer for your racial community and too Black for your queer community, or too immigrant for your American friends and too American for your family back home.

Comedians who work at these intersections—Joel Kim Booster exploring what it means to be Korean American and gay, Sam Jay navigating Black and queer identity, Hari Kondabolu addressing the absurdities of being South Asian in a culture still shaped by minstrelsy’s legacy—create humor that refuses to simplify identity for anyone’s comfort. This refusal is itself therapeutic. The psychological cost of concealing or compartmentalizing parts of your identity is well documented in minority stress research. Humor that integrates multiple identities into a single, coherent comedic voice models the very integration that mental health professionals identify as essential to well-being.

The Mental Health Functions of Marginalized Humor

Drawing across these traditions, several specific mental health functions of humor in marginalized communities become visible.

Naming What Cannot Be Named

Marginalized people often live in environments where their experiences of discrimination are denied, minimized, or rendered invisible. Humor can name these experiences in ways that bypass the defenses of both the dominant culture and the person’s own internalized self-doubt. When a comedian describes a microaggression—the white woman clutching her purse, the coworker’s surprised compliment about how “articulate” you are, the relative’s casual homophobia at Thanksgiving—and the audience laughs in recognition, something important has happened: a private experience has been validated as real, shared, and worthy of attention. This is the humor equivalent of what therapists call “witnessing”—the act of having one’s experience seen and acknowledged by another person.

Building Community Across Isolation

Marginalization, by definition, pushes people to the margins—away from one another and away from social resources. Humor builds bridges across that isolation. The shared laughter of a comedy show where the audience recognizes itself in the material creates a temporary community—a space where the minority experience is, for once, the majority experience. Research on Robin Dunbar’s social bonding theory suggests that shared laughter triggers endorphin release in ways similar to social grooming in primates, creating feelings of warmth and connection. For people who spend much of their lives managing the psychological toll of being different, these moments of communion are not trivial. They are restorative.

Reclaiming Narrative Control

One of the deepest injuries of marginalization is the loss of control over one’s own story. Stereotypes, media representations, and dominant cultural narratives define marginalized groups from the outside, often in ways that are reductive, dehumanizing, or simply wrong. Humor allows marginalized people to reclaim authorship of their own narratives. When a Black comedian satirizes a racial stereotype, they are not merely making a joke—they are asserting ownership of a narrative that has been used against their community. When a queer comedian performs their queerness with exaggerated camp, they are refusing the shame that the dominant culture attempts to attach to their identity. This reclamation is psychologically powerful. It transforms the person from an object of others’ humor into a subject wielding humor on their own terms.

Processing Collective Trauma

Individual therapy often helps people process personal trauma by constructing a coherent narrative of their experience. Communities process collective trauma through shared cultural practices—and humor is one of the most important of these. Jewish humor about persecution, Black humor about slavery and its legacy, queer humor about AIDS and violence, immigrant humor about displacement—each of these traditions takes experiences that are overwhelming in their scale and renders them into forms that can be shared, examined, and survived. Carpio’s concept of “rituals of redress” captures this function precisely: humor as a way of addressing historical injury not through solemnity alone but through the creative, social, and deeply human act of finding something to laugh about in the wreckage.

Modeling Resilience

Perhaps most importantly, humor in marginalized communities models a way of being in the world that refuses to be defined entirely by suffering. The comedian who turns discrimination into material is demonstrating—to themselves and to their audience—that pain does not have to be the last word. This does not mean that humor replaces anger, grief, or the demand for justice. The best marginalized humor exists alongside these responses, not in place of them. But it adds something that anger and grief alone cannot provide: the insistence that joy, cleverness, and creative self-expression remain possible even under the worst circumstances. This is what Fredriksen-Goldsen and colleagues’ Health Equity Promotion Model identifies as a “health-promoting pathway”—a behavioral, social, and psychological process that builds resilience in the face of structural disadvantage.

Dangers and Complications

No account of humor in marginalized communities would be honest without acknowledging the ways this humor can go wrong—even within the community.

There is the danger of humor as masking. When humor becomes the only permitted way of addressing pain, it can prevent deeper emotional processing. The comedian who is always funny may be a person who has never been given permission to be sad. The community that laughs at everything may be a community that has not created space for grief. As we explored in the chapters on depression and on humor ethics, the line between humor that processes trauma and humor that avoids it is not always easy to draw.

There is the danger of humor as gatekeeping. In-group humor can exclude as powerfully as it includes. The queer humor that builds solidarity among some community members may be inaccessible or alienating to others—particularly those who are newly out, less connected to queer cultural traditions, or navigating additional marginalized identities. The immigrant humor that bonds second-generation Americans may wound first-generation parents who hear disrespect where their children intend affection.

There is the danger of tokenization. When mainstream audiences discover marginalized humor, there is a tendency to flatten its complexity—to treat it as a window into an exotic community rather than as a sophisticated art form with its own history, rules, and internal debates. The comedian becomes a “representative” of their community, burdened with the expectation that they speak for millions of people whose experiences are as varied as any other group’s.

And there is the danger of what Ford and Ferguson’s prejudiced norm theory would predict: that humor which names stereotypes in order to critique them can be consumed by outside audiences as confirmation of those stereotypes. This is the double bind that Chappelle faced, that every marginalized comedian faces: the knowledge that you cannot control the meaning of your humor once it leaves your mouth, and that the very audience laughing hardest may be laughing for reasons that betray your intent.

Implications for Mental Health Practice

For mental health professionals working with clients from marginalized communities, understanding the role of humor in those communities is not optional—it is a form of cultural competence. A therapist who dismisses a Black client’s use of humor about racism as “avoidance” may be pathologizing one of the most effective coping strategies in the client’s cultural repertoire. A therapist who misreads a queer client’s camp sensibility as “not taking things seriously” may be failing to recognize a sophisticated form of identity affirmation. A therapist who doesn’t understand the role of humor in immigrant families may miss crucial dynamics in the family system.

The culturally informed therapist approaches client humor with curiosity rather than judgment. They recognize that humor from marginalized communities is often doing multiple things at once: coping, bonding, narrating, resisting, and sometimes also avoiding. The therapeutic task is not to eliminate humor or to uncritically celebrate it, but to understand its function for this particular client in this particular moment—and to help the client develop awareness of when humor is serving them and when it may be standing in for something that needs more direct attention.

Most fundamentally, mental health professionals need to recognize that the humor traditions of marginalized communities represent accumulated cultural wisdom about surviving adversity. These traditions were not developed in laboratories or validated through randomized controlled trials, but they have been tested across centuries of extreme stress in the most demanding conditions imaginable. When Black humor, queer humor, or immigrant humor makes a client laugh and visibly relax, something therapeutic is happening—something that the research on affiliative humor, social bonding, and stress buffering can help explain but did not invent.

The Last Laugh

The phrase “survival tool” appears in the subtitle of this chapter, and it is worth pausing over. A survival tool is not a luxury. It is not optional equipment for those who can afford it. It is what you reach for when your life depends on it. For communities that have faced slavery, genocide, criminalization, pathologization, deportation, and the systematic denial of their humanity, humor has been exactly that: a tool without which survival—psychological, communal, and sometimes physical—would have been harder or impossible.

But survival is only the beginning. The humor of marginalized communities does not merely help people endure; it helps them flourish. It creates beauty from suffering. It turns the rawness of lived experience into art. It takes the isolation of marginalization and transforms it into the electricity of shared recognition. And it insists, against all evidence to the contrary, that the people who have been told they are less than human are, in fact, among the most brilliantly, creatively, irrepressibly human beings on the planet.

This is not sentimentality. It is what the research shows. And it is what anyone who has ever sat in a room full of people laughing together at the absurdity of their shared predicament already knows: laughter, under certain conditions, is not the absence of pain but its transformation. And that transformation—when it is mutual, authentic, and anchored in genuine experience—is one of the most powerful forces for healing that human beings have ever discovered.

Sources and Suggested Reading

Key Research

Meyer, I. H. (2003). “Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations.” Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697.

Balsam, K. F., Molina, Y., Beadnell, B., Simoni, J., & Walters, K. (2011). “Measuring Multiple Minority Stress: The LGBT People of Color Microaggressions Scale.” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 17(2), 163–174.

Fredriksen-Goldsen, K. I., et al. (2014). “The Health Equity Promotion Model: Reconceptualization of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Health Disparities.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 84(6), 653–663.

Cheung, C.-K., & Yue, X. D. (2012). “The role of humor in coping with acculturative hassles.” Humor, 25(4).

Ford, T. E., & Ferguson, M. A. (2004). “Social consequences of disparagement humor: A prejudiced norm theory.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(1), 79–94.

Martin, R. A., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G., Gray, J., & Weir, K. (2003). “Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being.” Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 48–75.

Dunbar, R. I. M., et al. (2012). “Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 279(1731), 1161–1167.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.

Anderson, L. (2015). “Racist Humor.” Philosophy Compass, 10(8), 501–509.

Books

Carpio, G. (2008). Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. Oxford University Press.

Finley, J. (2023). Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity. University of North Carolina Press.

Krefting, R. (2014). All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Watkins, M. (1999). On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy. Lawrence Hill Books.

Dickson-Carr, D. (2001). African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel. University of Missouri Press.

Bhargava, R., & Chilana, R. (Eds.). (2022). Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy: Speaking Truth to Power. Routledge.

Sontag, S. (1966). Against Interpretation and Other Essays (“Notes on ‘Camp’”). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Apte, M. L. (1985). Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach. Cornell University Press.

Martin, R. A., & Ford, T. E. (2018). The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (2nd ed.). Academic Press.

Gates, H. L., Jr. (1988). The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press.

Selected Humor Scholarship

Toward a Critical Humor Studies Praxis (2024). Manifold@UMinnPress. Edited collection featuring J. Finley, Rebecca Krefting, and others.

Hietalahti, J. (2024). “Humanistic Ethics of Humor.” The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook, 5(1), 91–119.

Lintott, S. (2020). “Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette: Connection Through Comedy.” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 58(4), 610–631.

Organizations and Resources

Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (AATH) — aath.org

International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) — humorstudies.org

Critical Humor Studies Association — criticalhumorstudies.com

National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network (NQTTCN) — nqttcn.com

Mental Health America: LGBTQ+ Communities and Mental Health — mhanational.org