Hybrid Humour. Comedy in Transcultural Perspectives. Ed. Graeme Dunphy and Rainer Emig

This volume is an interesting attempt at bringing together research on migrant writings, caricature and oral genres, such as standup comedy across Europe: from Poland and Germany to Italy and France to the Netherlands and Britain. The rather fuzzy notion of hybridity (adopted from post-colonial theory) is selected as a theme uniting all those different cultural situations, which include not only the relations of ethnic minorities and majorities (four contributions), but also relations between generations of migrants and their attitude to the old country (one contribution) as well as those between tradition and modernity in national literature (one contribution). This makes the volume itself hybrid and less unified, although perhaps more analytically challenging. Contrary to what the title may suggest, the volume does not really focus on humour or comedy: it does refer to or give examples of literary, visual or oral humour, but their discussion mainly serves the purpose of making interesting comments on migration situations (with notable exceptions).