Humour as Resistance: Deviance and Pathology from a Ludic Perspective

Humour, as one aspect of the ludic, has been argued to evolve with humankind as a higher order of social cognition. In a slum community known for its social dysfunctions and multiple psychopathologies, street humour is used to re-classify messages, situations and relationships, in a variety of contexts. How can we make sense of the discontinuity? This paper builds on work reported in a previous one (Cardentildea 2003). Departing from information collected through participant observation, document analysis and clinical work carried with the community, the first paper documented the ways in which humour aids the assertion of a social identity. In the current paper, this point is developed further to scrutinize the role of 'pathology' under the light of a theory of humour, the ludic and meta-communication. The need to address the stature of socially patterned psychopathology as communicative act is emphasized. Deviant and aberrant behaviour, as ludic processes in the culture, embody a higher order of signification that is often overlooked by mental health agents. The failure at addressing this complexity halts the communication between the community's locals and the mental health agents, feeding back the kind of detrimental paradoxes that are at the core of the local's resistance.