Making Light of Imprisonment: Humour, Connection and Resistance

• In Event: Narrative Criminology #4: No Laughing Matter? Humor, Jokes and Satire in Research on Social Harms

Abstract

Between 2017 and 2021, the ESRC/AHRC-funded ‘Distant Voices: Coming Home’ project used creative practices to explore, understand and practice reintegration after state punishment (McNeill and Urie, 2020; Urie et al., 2017). The fieldwork involved 21 two- or three-day songwriting workshops with justice-affected people, 13 of which took place in Scottish prisons. In total, 150 songs were written by workshop participants. In previous papers, we have explored how both these songs and the process of collaborative songwriting that produced them served as devices for solving relational and personal problems that imprisonment poses (Crockett Thomas et al., 2020; Crockett Thomas et al., 2021). As might be expected, many of the songs (and the stories they mediate) deal with very difficult themes and are experienced by audiences as being emotionally ‘heavy’, yet clowning, joking and satire were very common within the project. In this paper, we explore how humour featured both in the songwriting process and in some of the songs, and we analyse the work that humour did for the participants, both by mediating human connection and by resisting penal power through mocking it.

Authors

• Fergus McNeill, Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow

• Oliver Escobar, University of Edinburgh

• Phil Crockett Thomas, University of Stirling

• Lucy Cathcart Frödén, University of Oslo, Norway

• Jo Collinson Scott, School of Business and Creative Industries, University of the West of Scotland

• Alison Urie, School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, University of Dundee