Investigations into uses of humour associated with the militant suffrage campaign of the Women's Social and Political Union have been largely concerned with the satirizing of suffragettes. The uses that suffragettes themselves made of humour as a considered political tactic have been less considered. This paper explores three ways in which suffragettes turned humour to their advantage during their campaign: by deliberately adopting “silly” behaviours as a counterpoint to over-formal and male dominated Edwardian politics; by quick-witted retorts to hecklers who sought to disrupt suffragette meetings and finally as a means of venting private political dissent and alleviating some of the stresses of hectic political campaigning. The exploration of humour within the WSPU's work reveals some of the links between humour and social protest in the early twentieth century, and considers the extent to which its use in public political behaviour might be gendered.

Two directions in the historiography of humour can be diagnosed: on the one hand humour is understood as a form of resistance, on the other hand it is taken as a means of political agitation. This dichotomy has been applied especially to describe humour in National Socialism and in other totalitarian regimes. This article argues that both forms were marginal in National Socialism. The prevalence of the “whispered jokes”, allegedly the form of resistance, has been exaggerated. The satire, allegedly the official and dominant form of humour, was not well-received by the National Socialistic public. This article will reconstruct the rise of a third form, the “German humour”, and discuss the reasons for its success by looking at why satire failed.

The largest corpus of jokes we have ridiculing both rulers and a political system comes from the former Soviet Union and the then communist countries of eastern Europe. These forbidden jokes were important to those who told them at some risk to themselves. They can be construed as a form of protest, but the relationship between jokes and protest is not a simple one. The number of jokes told was greater, and the telling more open, in the later years of the regimes than in the earlier years of terror and extreme hardship. The number of jokes is a product of the extensiveness of political control, not its intensity. Such jokes probably have no effect either in undermining a regime or in acting as a stabilizing safety valve. However, they were a quiet protest, an indication that the political system lacked stability and could collapse quickly.