Laughing in a Foreign Language explores the role of laughter and humour in contemporary art. In a time of increasing globalisation, this book questions whether humour can only be appreciated by people with similar cultural, political or historical backgrounds and memories, or whether laughter can act as a catalyst for understanding what you are not familiar with.
Do laughter and humour transcend difference and language, or are they dependent on inside knowledge and shared experience?
This book features illustrations of more than 70 video, photographic and installation works by 30 international artists. Many of these artists have experiences of living away from their home country, leading them to exploit the humour that arises out of everyday gaps in translation, or even to use humour to fill those gaps.