Marie Anaut is a clinical psychologist and a family and couples therapist. She teaches at Lyon-2 University.

Despite its levity, its playfulness with words and images, humour is not a simple distraction. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Drawing on numerous examples, Marie Anaut examines here various approaches to humour that reveal its crucial role in setting up protective procedures for people who have suffered. Specifically, she explores humour’s multiple dimensions in the emergence of the resilience process. Even in the midst of tragedy humour sometimes appears, and it is often an aid to survival in extreme situations. Only humour can make us capable of tolerating the intolerable.

• How does humour function? What part does it play in our relational dynamics and in the development of defence mechanisms when we are faced with harmful or destructive experiences?
• An approach based on an analysis of the articulations between humour and the resilience process.
• An exploration of the role and uses of humour throughout history and in different socio-historical contexts.