Abstract
This article examines humour as a unique reflection of and on social life, focusing on military humour as a reflection of the experiences of soldiers working in the armed forces. Soldiers are witnesses, victims, and perpetrators of harm, and instruments of the state tasked with “dirty work” scrutinised by society. Drawing on thick descriptions of military humour, this article explores how the military’s high-impact ambiguities and paradoxes results in a military culture infused with what can be termed “murky” humour, characterised by black humour, self-deprecation and humorous understatement. Functionalist, structuralist and phenomenological analyses uncover different functions and meanings, including emotional relief, social bonding, criticism and subversion, acknowledging absurdity and existential reflection. Murky humour deliberately leaves tensions and incongruities unresolved. By doing so, it acknowledges the interpretive difficulties of the military’s social reality, and helps to navigate these challenges, in a way that serious discourse often cannot achieve.
Against the backdrop of constant gunfire, a female Ukrainian soldier performs a silly dance in a TikTok video.1 At a military base in Afghanistan, American soldiers imitate a music video of a popular upbeat pop song.2 Military personnel all around the world dance in war zones. These spontaneous and often impromptu dance routines create a striking contrast with the reality of soldiering. Like the humour used on the military base, the dances possess a carnivalesque quality, blending elements of black humour, self-deprecation and understatement, where dehumanisation of both others and themselves is never far away.
To date, humour in high-impact organisations and “dirty work” occupations such as the military has been largely unexplored.3 While humour is recognised as a distinctly social phenomenon,4 the few studies on humour in professions like doctors, nurses, firefighters, police officers and soldiers primarily focus on its function as an individual coping strategy.5 Partly “as a consequence of the functionalist dominance, research on humour in organisations is often decontextualised.”6 Even when humour is examined in a specific organisation, it often relies on general assumptions without thoroughly exploring the organisational context and its connection to the studied humour.7
This article offers a conceptual exploration of new pathways, going beyond viewing high-impact professions solely as a mentally demanding setting and humour merely as a psychological coping mechanism. It demonstrates that social contexts shape people’s perceptions of their environment and attitudes toward their profession, giving rise to a distinct type of humour that allows them to reflect on and “speak back” to their context. By integrating insights from anthropological, psychological and philosophical research with organisational theory, and drawing on thick descriptions of military humour, this article aims to advance the current understanding of humour in relation to work.
Military humour has distinctive features that sets it apart from other national and occupational cultures of humour, yet shares striking similarities across nations. As will become clear, accounts from different militaries reveal black humour, self-deprecation and humorous understatement as typical features of military humour.8 This is no coincidence. This article demonstrates humour as a unique reflection of and on social life, arguing that the military’s specific context – ridden with high-impact ambiguities and paradoxes – gives rise to a distinctive form of humour, termed “murky” humour. This humour has not only important individual and social functions, such as coping and the reproduction of collective norms, but also significant structuralist and phenomenological aspects – nuanced meanings that are often overlooked in context-detached analyses of military life. Specifically, the military’s murky humour will be shown to deliberately leave tensions and incongruities unresolved, acknowledging the interpretive difficulties of the military’s social reality in a way that serious discourse often cannot achieve.
In addition to advancing the understanding of humour in relation to work, this article contributes to the study of work’s embeddedness in society. Firstly, it connects to the study of “dirty work.”9 The concept of dirty work refers to occupations that are both endorsed by society for their necessity, or even virtuousness, and simultaneously stigmatised due to the nature of the tasks involved, including the professions of butchers, surgeons, firefighters and undertakers. Soldiering is a prime example of “dirty work.” Soldiers, performing burdensome tasks in an organisation characterised by violence, operate on behalf of the state, which grants them a monopoly on violence. Moreover, soldiering occurs in a society where violence is relegated to the periphery, making soldiers both members and outsourced executors of violent activities, marked by societal endorsement and simultaneous stigma.10 Additionally, soldiers have a uniquely ambiguous and paradoxical relationship with their “dirty work.” They are potential witnesses, victims and perpetrators of violence, all at the same time.11 This distinctive relationship with violence will reveal yet another layer of complication.
Secondly, this complexity prompts an exploration into organisational ambiguity and paradox theory. Ambiguity involves a situation open to multiple interpretations or meanings;12 paradox refers to tensions between seemingly contradictory elements.13 Many organisations grapple with ambiguities and paradoxes, with employees having to balance competing tasks, roles, information and values.14 However, in dirty work occupations, these challenges are particularly impactful, with the military even facing life-or-death consequences.15 At the same time, societal imagery depicts soldiering not only as evil but also as heroic and fascinating, and workers themselves often take pride in their profession.16 This multiplicity of ambiguities and paradoxes adds to the intricacies, rendering soldiering “a dubious virtue.”17 As will become clear, humour offers an opportunity to grapple with such ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in “dirty work” occupations.
Uncovering the aforementioned insights was made possible by a focus on the “emic” aspect of the traditional anthropological distinction between “emic” and “etic” perspectives.18 In fact, it required this focus. The emic viewpoint emphasises life as experienced and described by the members of a community themselves, while the etic standpoint pertains to the analytical interpretations of the researcher. Historically, anti-military beliefs and values have predisposed anthropologists to denounce military phenomena a priori, directing their analyses towards a condemnatory interrogation of military institutional structures and pressures.19 As a result, in anthropological research on the military, an etic standpoint has generally been adopted, leading to resolutely “condemnatory critical” analyses.20 This article is committed to “emically” understand military humour. As a consequence, it must be acknowledged, it devotes only limited space to critically analyse how humour may normalise and legitimise violent behaviour by individuals and states, and even encourage dehumanisation and its devastating consequences. Yet, this article may be seen as complementary to current efforts that do focus on these aspects of “fun in war.”21
This article begins by discussing our current knowledge of humour in general, as well as organisational and military humour. It then explores examples of military humour, examining its manifestations both on base and in the field, and revealing their diverse meanings and implications. It closes with the implications of this study for understanding humour and work, organisational ambiguity and paradox, and the unique challenges of dirty work occupations.
Into the Looking Glass of Humour in Dirty, Ambiguous and Paradoxical Occupations
Humour as Playing with Meanings
Research on humour has been modest despite its ubiquity in daily life.22 Today, humour is mainly studied in the fields of psychology and linguistics, but the theories that are now considered classic – superiority theory, relief theory and incongruity theory – come mainly from philosophers.23 Superiority theory posits that humour can be used as a tool to assert one’s superiority over others. Relief theory sees humour as a coping mechanism for psychological stress.24 Freud, for instance, argued that laughter relieves tension stemming from suppressed sexual and aggressive impulses that cannot be expressed openly.25 Incongruity theory explains humour as arising from the disparity between our perception of the world and its reality.26 For instance, the incongruity principle illuminates why a medical team might laugh about beeper pages such as “Doctor, your patient is covered in ants” and “Doctor, your patient is on fire.”27 Besides reasons of relief, such laughter is an expression of incongruity between expectations of logic and reality.
Hybrid theories have emerged in the post-classical era, often incorporating a social scientific perspective. Scholars have come to recognise that “just as one cannot tickle oneself, so, too, one can hardly tell oneself a joke or play a prank on oneself.”28 Initially, most sociological research approached humour as a social corrective to maintain social cohesion and stability. Increasingly, however, studies have highlighted its role in inciting resistance, conflict, ridicule and harassment.29
Apart from the functionalist focus on sociological (dys)functions, studies explore perspectives like structuralism and phenomenology.30 The significance of ambiguity and paradox in humour has gained attention, with terms such as “playing with meanings” and “playing with aggression.”31 Structuralists, like Douglas, see humour as deliberately “out of place”; as an “anti-rite” undermining established orders.32 This perspective aligns with Incongruity theory, yet particularly emphasises the moral and social significance of humour as a break with expectations. As Kuipers33 describes, the “mismatching often involves the transgression of social norms, or the breaking of established social patterns.” According to this view, humour, while discomforting, allures precisely due to its violation of moral and social standards.34 Humour is humour because it is transgressive.
Phenomenology views humour as a specific outlook on the social world, focusing on how individuals perceive and make sense of it. Like structuralists, they often draw on Incongruity theory but use it to understand how humour, as the disruption of expectations, constructs the social world.35 Critchley, for instance, explores how humour “views the world awry, bringing us back to the everyday by estranging us from it,” and how as such it “changes the situation in which we find ourselves, or lights up the everyday by providing an oblique phenomenology of ordinary life.”36 In a similar vein, Zijderveld37 – who calls humour “playing with meanings,” among which “institutional meanings” – compares humour to a “looking glass.” Humour, he argues, allows us “to look at the world and ourselves in a slightly distorted, and hence revealing, way.”38
Research on Humour in the Armed Forces
Despite these developments, many studies on humour in organisations still revolve around its functions and dysfunctions.39 In research on humour in the armed forces, which is notably scarce, this implicit functionalist tendency is particularly evident. Most studies on military humour focus on its function as a psychological coping mechanism.40 When they do explore the social aspects of humour, researchers often emphasise what they consider as dysfunctions of humour (while these functions may be considered functional from the dominant military perspective), such as how military humour reinforces traditional masculine norms while marginalising women and lgbt+ individuals,41 and how humour normalises and justifies war and engagement in war.42 The aforementioned “etic” perspective is evident here.
Recently, a scant but growing number of studies have encompassed alternative perspectives, revealing the use of humour in military contexts as many-sided.43 As Ben-Ari and Sion explain, to focus only on how military humour reproduces norms around “the importance of military duty, the centrality of male heterosexual identity and the exclusion of women” is “to miss the essentially subversive quality of jocularity.”44 They emphasise that “there is always a lack of clarity in humour, an essential obtuseness to jokes because one never ‘really knows’ whether the criticism voiced through them is laughable or serious.”45 At the same time, military humour is not as effectively subversive as sometimes suggested, and not even intended as such. For instance, when a commander is mocked, this is often not intended as subversion but rather to reinforce expectations of good soldiers (ibid). As Bjerke and Rones46 and Johais47 show, humour may also serve as a strategy for soldiers to manage life in the “total institution” of the military, where their daily lives are almost completely under bureaucratic control.
So, humour in the military has a subversive quality, enabling soldiers to express dissent towards military power by “joking up” toward superiors. At the same time, it tends to preserve the social order – if not the social order of the military at large then at least the specific social order of the joking group. Likewise, soldiers use humour to criticise living and working conditions, but in doing so their humour simultaneously functions as a coping mechanism to manage adversity, thereby perpetuating the status quo.
Into the Looking Glass of Military Humour
In short, humour is not just a matter of play but a serious and highly complex business, involving elements of inclusion and exclusion, resistance and conformity, coping and commentary, and so on. Therefore, researchers have emphasised the importance of understanding the specific context in which humour is expressed, including the prevailing social rules, norms and taboos, in order to fully comprehend its intended meanings and purposes.48 At the same time, conversely, it has been argued that humour is a valuable analytical tool for understanding the specific context in which it is used, by exposing and exploring the prevailing rules, norms and taboos that humour relies on.49 This article similarly approaches humour as a phenomenon that requires understanding in its wider context while also using it as a lens through which to gain a deeper understanding of this context.
To avoid circular reasoning, a significant contextual feature of military practice is first defined (see also Figure 1). As stated, a fundamental aspect of high-impact professions is their multifaceted relationship with violence, particularly in the military.50 While other high-impact professions, such as firefighting and healthcare, also involve harm and suffering, soldiers may have to inflict pain on individuals without directly serving their benefit, while serving a purpose that may not always be clear to them, and while facing the risk of injury and death.51 This complexity is further compounded by the entanglement of the military with politics and society. As instruments of the state, soldiers are tasked with performing “dirty work” as members of a fascinated-yet-critical society.52 This is what distinguishes the military profession, shared only with the police: soldiers have multiple relationships with violence, as potential witnesses, victims and perpetrators of harm, and as state instruments scrutinised by a society of which they are also members, all at the same time, resulting in an ambiguous and paradoxical moral and social standing.
Occupational characteristics of soldiering
Citation: Public Anthropologist 7, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/25891715-bja10066
Deeper into the Looking Glass of “Murky Humour”
Exploring military humour uncovers three distinct styles: black humour, self-deprecation and humorous understatement. This section analyses these styles and their functional, structural and experiential dimensions, which offers insight into how military humour acknowledges and reflects on the ambiguous and paradoxical nature of soldiering as “dirty work.”
Interspersed throughout this discussion are several illustrations of military humour at various stages of military life, encompassing basic training to in-theatre experiences. These examples were gathered during the author’s work as a researcher on military experience and as a lecturer for officers in training. Between 2010 to 2023, the author conducted fieldwork for different studies among Dutch soldiers and veterans, involving over 200 interviews and 20 participant observations. In these studies, humour consistently emerged, documented in detailed fieldnotes, which encompass a diverse range of interlocutors, including enlisted soldiers and senior officers, with a wide range of deployment experiences. Yet, the examples presented here serve not so much as data but rather as illustrations of the overall argument.53
Drinking Beer from a Prosthetic Leg and Other Murky Jokes
Humour as Initiation
Newcomers enter a military unit through an initiation ritual. Such rituals form a microcosm, a condensed representation of the larger universe of the military and its humour. A prototypical example is the formal initiation ritual of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal service, a specialised military unit responsible for disposing of explosives such as bombs and mines, wearing the specialised suit made famous by films such as The Hurt Locker.
Upon successful completion of the demanding Explosive Ordnance Disposal training course, a soldier joins the select group of bomb disposal operators. However, before this, they must undergo induction activities known as “beating in” (inslaan) and “drinking in” (indrinken). Despite the alarming terminology, these activities involve no actual pain.. Instead, new operators walk down a corridor surrounded by a guard of honour consisting of fellow operators who playfully beat them with paddles and sticks on the legs. This occurs under the watchful eye of their relatives at the corridor’s end, accompanied by loud jeers and laughter. Following this welcoming ceremony, they enter a canteen filled with unit relics, including a wall of mugs inscribed with the names of current and former operators. The operators present fill their mugs with beer, which they consume after a ceremonial but cheerful initiation speech. The new operator drinks their beer from a unique container: a prosthetic leg. This leg once belonged to a former operator who stepped on a mine, reportedly saving the lives of the rest of the bomb squad by doing so. The family donated the leg to the unit after the operator’s death, which was incorporated into the initiation ritual of new operators. The task is to finish the leg full of beer without interruption, often resulting in amusing mishaps. If unsuccessful, they must try again. While it is clear to everyone that they have already proven themselves by passing the rigorous training, official recognition as an operator only comes after completing this ritual.
The ritual brims with symbolism that reflects the demands of the military profession as a whole and the Explosive Ordnance Disposal service in particular. Both its content and form express the perceived importance of unit cohesion, the unique job of bomb disposal operators, the inherent danger and risks of injury or death, and the necessity of self-sacrifice for the unit and the safety of society. Before elaborating on the various functions and meanings of traditions like these, let us explore some more typical examples of military humour.
Fool’s Errands and Self-Dehumanisation
Practical jokes are very common in the military. Unlike the formalised initiation rituals previously mentioned, these jokes are not institutionalised practices. However, they are deeply embedded in military culture, perpetuated through tradition and shared experiences among soldiers, and generally institutionally tolerated as part of military life. The newcomers in a unit are the primary targets of practical jokes, for several weeks until they fully integrate into the group. For instance, they are sent on meaningless tasks such as fool’s errands, making them fruitlessly search for imaginary objects like the “compass key,” the “box with spark plug sparks” or the “shell casing magnet.” As time goes on, the new soldiers are welcomed as part of the unit.
In addition to light-hearted pranks, the serious theme of dehumanisation is commonplace in the military, again in a subverting form: the butt of dehumanisation humour on the home base is usually not the enemy but the soldiers themselves.54 For instance, in the Dutch Army, the general infantry emblem features the Latin motto “nulli cedo,” which means “I yield to no one.” Some soldiers, however, prefer to translate it as “Useless bodies create own cause of death” (which only works in Dutch: “NUtteLoos LIchaam Creëert Eigen DoodsOorzaak”). In general, rather than referring to themselves as human individuals, soldiers call themselves and each other “maggots,” “ladies,” “pussies,” “faggots,” “bodies” and “corpses.” For example, they may motivate each other during an exhausting exercise by yelling: “Come on ladies, hit it with those fat corpses” (Kom op dames, rammen met je vette kadaver). Also, an ongoing joke in the Dutch armed forces is the idea that soldiers’ girlfriends and wives will cheat on them while they are away on exercises or deployment with “Stanley,” a fictional character imagined as a well-hung black man.
Through such designations, soldiers transform each other and themselves into “a new entity, not woman, not man, but a womanly man, an un-man.”55 Or, in fact, into a non-individual and even a non-human. As will be discussed in more detail below, in doing so, they engage in a kind of self-deprecation which in its radicality acknowledges the actual dangers of the military job, while at the same time humorously mocking the job.
“Situation Normal: All Fucked Up”
One final example of military humour on base involves the act of mocking one’s own circumstances. For instance, informal social media accounts dedicated to military humour often show videos of miserable soldiers stumbling around in muddy woods or cleaning rain-soaked barracks with their hoods up, filmed by grinning colleagues.56 Recurring images also include photos of soldiers’ vehicles stuck in the mud or crucial military equipment broken beyond repair, resulting in makeshift fixes like taping up an entire car door.57 Internationally, snafu is therefore a well-known acronym in armed forces, standing for the sarcastic expression “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.” Soldiers’ social media accounts often show images of “situations normal” – miserable soldiers – alongside promotional videos made by the military, portraying heroic soldiers who “continue where others stop” to “protect what is dear to us,” as military recruitment slogans proclaim. Another rewarding subject of military humour is the low salaries of rank-and-file soldiers, allegedly lower than those of McDonald’s employees. Additionally, soldiers often joke about the frustrating irony of being tasked with operating expensive weapons systems or driving tanks in dangerous conflict areas, while being forbidden by “the boss” (the military organisation) from using a simple toaster in their barracks due to fire hazards.
In all such jokes, a particular collective self-image emerges: being a miserable private living a dull and uneventful life in the barracks, treated like a child by their boss, betrayed by their partners, all while earning a meagre salary, waiting to be deployed on a mission in a distant land where they might die.
Black Humour, Self-Deprecation and Understatement
These illustrations exemplify black humour, self-deprecation and understatement as key, intertwined components of military humour. As will be discussed, these styles all share the common characteristic that they reflect, and reflect on, the harsh ambiguities and paradoxes of soldiering.
Black Humour
Black humour is a style of humour that makes light of otherwise taboo subjects such as suffering and death, mercilessly violating these taboos. This style is evident in the ritual of “beating in,” drinking from a prosthetic leg and self-dehumanisation jokes. According to dictionary definitions, black humour is “used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world.”58
Of course, as will be discussed, black humour can be a step on a slippery slope leading to moral disengagement, but when done in conscious awareness, the opposite may be the case. Simply dismissing black humour as unprofessional is an undervaluation of its meanings and implications. While making light of grim and morbid situations, black humour acknowledges them instead of denying their existence.59 Take the fact that dehumanisation in soldiers’ jokes is typically directed not at the enemy but at the soldiers themselves. Black humour implies purposefully stepping outside the moral and emotional domain, living “in a terrain of terrifying candor concerning the most extreme situations.”60
Self-Deprecation
In addition, self-deprecation surfaces as a recurring feature of military jokes, a style of humour where people make fun of themselves and their flaws or mistakes. These jokes often express cheerful Schadenfreude toward colleagues and frustration with superiors and the military organisation, but at their core is the recognition that the joke applies to oneself. With these jokes, soldiers mockingly acknowledge that they all voluntarily signed up for a job that can make them feel like meaningless cogs in a physically, psychologically and morally dangerous system.
Self-deprecating humour has been documented as a means to diffuse tension, show humility and connect with others.61 Unlike self-defeating humour, which articulates a negative and depressive view of the self, self-deprecating humour conveys an honest and humble look at oneself.62 In addition, military self-deprecation has two features beyond those typically associated with this humour style. Firstly, it targets not just the individual self but also the military “we,” “us idiots,” sharing a risky job for little pay and sometimes without even the basic tools. Secondly, military self-deprecation addresses the soldier’s job’s essence of violence and suffering, akin to black humour but in a more indirect manner. Again, recall the importance of self-dehumanisation in military humour. This type of self-deprecation is a collective acknowledgment of the perils of military work and the necessary self-dehumanisation involved in performing such duties.
Understatement
Humorous understatement is a third typical feature of military humour. Understatement intentionally downplays the importance of things, presenting something as less significant than it really is. As a consequence, it creates an incongruity between expectation and reality, making it funny.63 This allows people to express the actual seriousness of the situation in a joking manner.
In the military, moreover, humorous understatements often have a “carnivalesque” quality, as they temporarily subvert the seriousness of military life. Furthermore, like carnival, some understatements may seem ludicrous at first sight, while they actually mirror the absurdity of the reality they address, not unlike the comic relief provided by hospital clowns for terminally ill children.64 For instance, drinking beer from a prosthesis may seem like a ridiculous overstatement, but actually, it is an understatement of the extreme conditions that military personnel face. The fact that soldiers willingly expose themselves to violence, whether as witnesses, victims, or perpetrators, is an absurd reality that is both underscored and understated by these types of jokes.
Functional, Structural and Experiential Aspects
Functionalist Aspects
From a functionalist perspective, all three styles of humour can be seen as serving the purpose of emotional relief. Specifically, following a Freudian interpretation of humour, many jokes can be viewed as revealing repressed instincts, particularly aggression.65 Most of the aforementioned jokes directly or indirectly refer to suffering, injury and death. Through humour, soldiers can articulate these subjects and their feelings about them while diffusing potential discomfort normally associated with these topics, or even without evoking such tension.
Thus, military humour can help to alleviate psychological pressure, allowing soldiers to cope with their emotions and provide both themselves and others with a sense of relief. Also, it works as a disciplining mechanism and a way to build social bonds, while at the same time enabling soldiers to voice critique and complaint about their working conditions without disrupting cohesion or hierarchy. As such, military humour serves as both a psychological and social defence mechanism that appears as essential to the violent job of being a soldier.
Structural Aspects
The “funniest humour is not necessarily the healthiest,” as researchers on humour have pointed out.66 A structuralist perspective does not focus on humour as coping, but draws attention to the complex role of incongruity in military humour. By making fun of the worst aspects of life, military jokes transgress significant psychological, emotional and moral expectations and boundaries. Exemplarily, the bomb squad ritual relies on the incongruity principle twice, yet in unusual ways. First, the ritual entails being beaten on the legs, which typically represents pain and punishment, but in this case signifies festivity and reward. Second, the tradition involves drinking beer, which is commonly associated with celebrating health and life, but in this context is consumed from a prosthetic leg symbolizing injury and death.
Incongruity jokes typically result in a resolution of the cognitive incongruity that, in doing so, also resolves the emotional and moral tension that came with it.67 Yet, this does not happen here. While the ritual does diffuse the seriousness of violence, allowing the brutal dangers of the job to be recognised in an acceptable manner, it leaves the incongruity of celebrating one’s initiation into a violent profession and the potential risk of prosthetic legs unresolved. The soldiers are not freed from this incongruity. As suggested, this lack of resolution seems to stem from the fact that the incongruity lies not within the ritual itself, but rather in the reality it represents.
Experiential Aspects
This last point brings a phenomenological perspective into play. While a structuralist understanding emphasises the manifestation of military humour as playing with established social patterns, a phenomenological lens reveals that, in doing so, it also serves as a poignant commentary on the existential and social realities faced by soldiers. As Critchley eloquently wrote,68 the “extraordinary thing about humour is that it returns us to common sense by distancing us from it.”
As we saw, black humour in the military context is not just a joke about imaginary horror, but a candid contemplation of real suffering and death, and an expression of the absurdity of being a soldier. Humour in this sense is “what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.”69 Similarly, self-deprecation is not just about making fun of oneself, but about expressing a collective perception and construction of the military world. Humorous understatement, finally, serves as a playful yet accurate reflection of the complicated relationship between soldiers and violence, as it subverts the seriousness of violence while as such acknowledging the inherent need for soldiers to be capable of dealing with it.
To condense the different aspects of military humour into a single characterisation, black humour, self-deprecation and humorous understatement are all “murky” styles of humour: they are harsh styles of humour and focused on ambiguity and/or paradox without escape. That is, while humour typically seeks to resolve ambiguity and paradoxes, for instance through a liberating punch line,70 military humour often intentionally lacks resolution. Humour without the resolution of incongruities has been labelled a style of “nonsense” in humour research.71 However, it makes perfect sense in the context of the military. The harshness, ambiguity and paradox in military humour do not so much provide a funnily weird lens through which to view soldiers’ serious world, like the way a funhouse mirror distorts reality. Rather, they quite accurately reflect the harsh ambiguities and paradoxes of the military as an organisation complicatedly centred around the use of violence.
Murky Humour While Doing the Real Dirty Work
Military humour on the home base reflects the challenges of military life during training and exercising, while also preparing soldiers for the harsher realities of deployment. In the theatre of operations, the real dirty work of deployment can intensify existing ambiguities and paradoxes into serious, existential ambiguities and paradoxes. The illustrations presented below provide a glimpse into the heightened absurdity that can be witnessed in theatre.
The Delights of Battle
As mentioned in the introduction, soldiers around the world have been captured on video doing silly dances while in full camouflage gear, sometimes in the midst of conflict zones where gunshots can be heard in the background. By poking fun at both military stereotypes of masculine toughness and the grave reality of risking injury and death, the dances offer a playful respite amidst the gravity of the situation without denying this reality. However, remarkably, these dances serve a purpose beyond being a mere contrasting respite. The true absurdity lies in the fact that on the battlefield, dancing is more akin to a paradox – an apparent contradiction that, upon closer examination, reveals itself to be not necessarily contradictory. Many soldiers have genuinely reported perceiving deployment as a joyful experience.72 Speaking about deployment, including combat, soldiers often describe a mixture of antagonistic feelings, including fear, adrenaline and excitement. They perceive combat not only as a disturbing and distressing experience, but also as something they have looked forward to. Accordingly, silly dances offer them a source of enjoyment as a part of the broader experience of finding “delight in battle.”73
Me: “What was the first time you had contact with enemy fire like?”
Him: “Yeah, exciting! (…) We went towards that village [where reportedly a lot of the military opponents were staying]. Women and children were all walking out of the village, in one direction. And suddenly you heard the first bullets. Everyone was actually very excited and laughing, like ‘cool, cool, cool!’ Then you heard mortars coming in, and we were like ‘fuck!’”
Many combat veterans have told the author that they got “a kick” out of engaging in combat. “I found it good, a very special feeling” one veteran related. “You soar above yourself. You become like, if you’re past the fear, at one point, it’s something very unique. And something very … primal.”
Antagonistic Feelings and Absurdity
In line with this, there are numerous videos made by soldiers of their unit whooping and laughing as their bombs hit and explode in the distance. Hearing the loud cheers, which indeed sometimes sounded “primal,” one gets the impression they are cheering not only at the specific bombs in question, but at everything and nothing all at once. As wwii veteran Gray states, if “we think of beauty and ugliness without their usual moral overtones, there is often a weird but genuine beauty in the sight of massed men and weapons in combat.”74 Soldiers’ accounts of combat also resonate with how war stories are depicted by Vietnam veteran and novelist O’Brien. “War is hell,” he writes, echoing a famous and often-used phrase, “but that’s not the half of it, because war is mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love.”75 He continues, “War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”76 Through this description, O’Brien eloquently captures the inherent ambiguities and paradoxes of being a soldier in theatre, which were already present on the base but are now starkly evident.
Bizarre things happen. We were in a firefight, and our gunfire blew a man in half. He was dead on the spot, and the two halves of his body fell in a weird way. I’m now telling this with a bit of shame on my cheeks, because it’s totally misplaced to laugh at a dead person, you just can’t do that. But it just looked genuinely funny, I can’t lie. It was just comical.
The relief principle – that humour serves to relieve tension – may in part account for his laughter. Yet, the soldier who shared the experience also emphasised that the unexpected sight was “just comical,” aligning with incongruity theory. Furthermore, his acknowledgement that the laughter was “misplaced” echoes a structuralist perspective that laughter about violence is out of place, as violence itself is a “matter out of place.”77 Hence, soldiers also make dark jokes about the deaths of civilians or colleagues during deployment, because their deaths, too, violate emotional, social and moral boundaries.
When Ambiguities and Paradoxes are No Longer Recognised
While soldiers may differ in their views on the appropriateness of black humour in the face of real death, this type of humour tends to uphold rather than challenge the taboo on death. Black humour, as defined here, acknowledges that while deaths are common in every war, they are never normal, representing both a typical and anomalous aspect of war.
Yet, it is precisely when such paradoxes are no longer recognised, as seen in infamous incidents like the Abu Ghraib prison photos, a dangerous problem arises. The laughter in Abu Ghraib, it appears, served as a horrific “medium to radically exclude others – treating them as ridiculous puppets on strings or dogs on a leash, toys, objects at the brink of destruction” while at the same time accentuating “the solidarity of those laughing.”78 At this point, the ambiguities and paradoxes of soldiering cease to be recognised and acknowledged, leading to a shift from humour based on the incongruity principle to humour based on the superiority principle. Black humour transforms into outright Schadenfreude, self-deprecation turns into actual self-dehumanisation, and humorous understatement changes into moral numbness. Military humour, in such cases, has gone rogue.
Specific Theoretical Implications
As humour can only be understood in its wider context, it forms a lens to delve deeper into this context. Military humour arises as both a reflection of and commentary on the specific military context, which itself is inextricably embedded in a complex socio-political context.
Ambiguities and Paradoxes at Various Occupational Levels
As established, soldiers are victims, witnesses and perpetrators of violence, which physically, psychologically and morally challenging for both themselves and society.79 The study of military humour unravels additional ambiguities and paradoxes stemming from this essential complexity, across various levels of the military profession (Figure 1). At the socio-political level, soldiers possess a complicated state-granted monopoly on violence. They are not a rabble of armed bandits, but carry out “dirty work” as a “continuation of policy by other means,” to cite Clausewitz’s famous dictum, yet in a society that increasingly shuns violence and risk. Politically, the armed forces may participate in military partnerships not just to contribute to improving the local situation, but to demonstrate loyalty to the UN and nato.80 Societally, the military is both a revered societal class of people who “protect what is dear to us” and a criticised anomaly in a risk- and violence-averse society. To reconcile these paradoxes, the political leadership may create strategically ambiguous mandates and narratives of military operations rather than acknowledging the inherent contradictions.81 Thus, soldiers’ socio-political position creates multiple paradoxes.
As an organisation, the armed forces operate as both a warrior-family and a bureaucratic institution. Soldiers are socialised into a close-knit brotherhood with significant responsibility and autonomy, expected to perform highly demanding tasks in dangerous and high-stress environments, with the motto of “leaving no one behind.” However, they are also expected to comply with a strongly centralised hierarchy and are viewed as replaceable assets within a bureaucracy. Again, these paradoxical aspects are not explicitly articulated but emerge implicitly, reflected in confusingly equivocal command doctrines.82 This situation echoes the Catch-22 depicted in the eponymous novel, where a soldier could be relieved of duty if deemed insane, yet wanting to be relieved was itself seen as a sign of sanity – creating a self-referential paradox that is impossible to escape.
Ambiguities and Paradoxes in Lived Experience
These complexities directly affect soldiers’ lived experience (Figure 2). On the one hand, soldiers must embody a military identity that demands a 24/7 commitment and a flexible can-do attitude to adapt to dangerous and unpredictable circumstances. On the other hand, they learn to view their profession as “just a job” and must comply with strict safety regulations, even over seemingly petty matters such as having toasters in their barracks. Also, they face the mixed views that civilians hold towards their work, often fascinated yet uncomfortable with the realities of their job. While soldiers are often portrayed as heroes in societal imagery, they may receive McDonald’s-like salaries, their partners may cheat on them while away, and they may face criticism upon returning home from their operations.
The ambiguous and paradoxical lived experience of dirty work occupations
Citation: Public Anthropologist 7, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/25891715-bja10066
The complex workings of these ambiguities and paradoxes become even more palpable during deployment. Upon hearing the first sounds of fire contact, the skills and drills of deployed soldiers come into play, while simultaneously they are thrust into an intense, “primal” experience of combat. To preserve their humanity, they must keep viewing violence as abnormal, which would make stress a normal response to an abnormal situation. At the same time, repeated exposure to violence can make violence a commonplace aspect of their mission, while responding with great stress to violence becomes increasingly atypical. Finally, as deployed soldiers strive to maintain a sense of normalcy within themselves, the violence they encounter can be a profound, life-altering experience.
Murky Humour to Live through Tensions
It is clear that there are many resemblances between military humour and the humour used in other high-impact professions such as police work, firefighting and healthcare.83 At the same time, it became evident that the unique, many-sided relationship that military personnel have with violence gives rise to a distinctive culture of humour. Military culture is permeated by black humour, self-deprecation and humorous understatement, all of which are murky styles of humour: harsh styles of humour, focused on ambiguity and paradox. Murky humour serves multiple functions and conveys various meanings, including emotional relief, social bonding, criticism and subversion, acknowledging absurdity and existential reflection. At a deeper level, the second-order functions and meanings of murky humour involve articulating ambiguities and paradoxes while diffusing emotional, social and moral friction. Ultimately, it seems, murky humour serves to grapple with and live through tensions (Figure 3).
The functions and meanings of murky humour in dirty work occupations
Citation: Public Anthropologist 7, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/25891715-bja10066
Wider Theoretical Implications
Together, these findings enhance the existing understanding of humour and work, particularly of humour as lived experience in relation to organisational ambiguity and paradox and the phenomenon of dirty work (Figure 4). As such, this article also has wider theoretical implications.
Murky humour in dirty work occupations
Citation: Public Anthropologist 7, 1 (2025) ; 10.1163/25891715-bja10066
Murky Humour as Reflection on Symbolic and Real Dirt
This paper’s contextualised exploration of military humour, drawing on thick descriptions, integrated anthropological, organisational, psychological and philosophical literature. This integration both confirms and extends insights on dirty work and humour in organisations. The taint of dirty work has been found to foster a strong occupational culture where collective humour serves as a defence against this taint, consistent with previous findings on dirty work.84 In structuralist terms, humour is an anti-rite that counters the socially and morally transgressive nature of dirty work. Through the use of humour, workers can redefine their work identity and uphold a sense of pride in their profession despite its dirty connotations. That said, this article shows that humour employed in dirty work is not solely a functional defence mechanism, but also allows insightful and even existential reflection for people. Dirty work may create murky humour, characterised by harshness, ambiguity and paradox, which is a reflection of and on the nature of the dirty work. As scholars have shown,85 too often studies have focused on only the symbolic dimensions of (dirty) work. Yet, the symbolic and material are fundamentally entwined in dirty work. In the military, murky humour comments, first, on the symbolic pollution of working with violence and, second, on the tangibly muddy ambiguities and paradoxes of doing so as a potential witness, victim and perpetrator.
Humour as More Real than Serious Discourse
The previous point also ties in with theory on the role of humour in relation to the experience of tension. In the literature, humour is often approached as a means of resolving tensions.86 Yet, in military humour, frictions and incongruities are often purposefully left unresolved, serving to reflect the inherent ambiguity and paradox within the occupation and organisation. This perspective on humour aligns better with an understanding of humour as possessing a unique ability to do what serious discourse of reason and logic cannot: dealing with the “interpretive difficulties” of social reality by shedding light on them through articulation.87 While inconsistencies are problematic in serious discourse, they are an integral aspect of humour. Humour emerges from the multiplicity of social reality, and “occurs because mundane, serious discourse simply cannot cope with its own interpretive multiplicity.”88 Thus, our usual, ordered perception of the world is in fact a fictional construct, while reality itself is stranger than any fiction.
Humour to Make Trauma “Speakable”
Humour serves not only as a helpful coping mechanism providing collective emotional relief, but also as a facilitator of discourse capable of embracing ambiguities and paradoxes. It is well-documented that members of high-impact organisations often avoid speaking about their experiences. This has been attributed to stigma, avoidance behaviour and more generally to the difficulty of linguistically expressing trauma.89 This article points to an additional explanation: usual discourse fails to accommodate ambiguities and paradoxes, while the very shocking quality of violence, stress and trauma is that it lacks logic, meaning and purpose.90 Humour may provide individuals with the language and means to articulate their complex experiences. Mental health research has already shown that humour can be used in therapy “to break a client’s resistance, reduce tension, generate catharsis, and increase trust in the client/therapist relationship.”91 In addition, humour seems to allow communication of previously incommunicable experiences. That is, humour possesses the potential to transform seemingly “unspeakable” traumatic memories into narratives that facilitate healing.
Humour and Anthropology
A final implication directly concerns researchers. To reiterate, humour reflects the complexities that people face, and in doing so, it makes it possible to reflect on these complexities. In particular, humour allows members of organisations, cultures and society at large to reflect on the inherent ambiguities and paradoxes in their communities. This insight also carries implications for researchers, anthropologists and others. In a sense, humour can be likened to social sciences. Both serve to deconstruct the world and hold up a mirror to us all, reflecting its relativity and occasional absurdity back to us.92 However, researchers often struggle to effectively articulate the ambiguities and paradoxes they encounter, opting instead to resolve contradictions and inconsistencies in respondents’ statements as kinks that need to be ironed out.93 Yet, by taking these contradictions and inconsistencies seriously, just as humour does, researchers can shed light on important aspects of individuals’ experiences as well as the broader organisational context in which those experiences are embedded, aspects that would otherwise remain unnoticed.
Conclusion
To recap, military humour can only be fully understood in relation to the specific ambiguities and paradoxes of the military context, which in turn must be seen as inextricably embedded within a complex wider socio-political context (Figure 1). An essential feature of the military profession is that soldiers are potential victims, witnesses and perpetrators of violence, not only as military instruments but also as willing agents. Socio-politically, soldiers have a state-granted yet highly scrutinised monopoly on violence, characterised by both societal fascination and condemnation. Accordingly, at the organisational level, soldiers operate as both a warrior-family and a bureaucratic institution, tasked with violence yet constrained by strict safety regulations. These occupational, organisational and socio-political complexities are integral to soldiers’ daily lives (Figure 2). As a result, murky humour arises, allowing soldiers to acknowledge the interpretive complexities of their military reality and navigate these challenges in ways that serious discourse often cannot achieve (Figure 3). Among other implications, these findings help better understand humour in the workplace, particularly as it relates to organisational ambiguity and paradox, and dirty work (Figure 4).
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