Making Light of Imprisonment: Humour, connection and resistance

Abstract

In previous papers, we have explored how songs written in prison, and the process of collaborative songwriting that produced them, served as devices for solving relational and personal problems that imprisonment poses. Here, drawing on data from the same project (Distant Voices: Coming Home), we explore and analyse how humour featured both in the songwriting process and in some of the songs, focusing on two songs written by women in prison. Our analysis reveals how humour worked in these contexts as a technology of community-building and as a mode of subtle subversion, insubordination and ‘soft resistance’ to penal power (Laursen, 2016). However, we also note the importance of attending to humour’s temporariness, its deniability and its unpredictability. As such, prison humour occupies an unusual but important position in narrative terms, somewhere between the said and the unsaid (Presser 2022); and that position allows it to do important personal, relational and political work.