It's no laughing matter… Boys’ humour and the performance of defensive masculinities in the classroom

Abstract

This article explores the centrality of humour in the performance and maintenance of a defensive masculine identity among a group of white, Irish, working-class boys in school. A series of extracts from the field demonstrate how that humour is deployed in versatile and creative ways in order to refuse and subvert a direct questioning of traditional, hegemonic masculinity in the classroom. In the specific context discussed here the boys are responding to a recent Irish educational initiative known as the Exploring Masculinities programme. This programme, through its presentation of ‘alternative’ masculine identities, offered an overt challenge to long-established and deeply felt understandings of what constitutes a ‘real man’. Analysis of the responses of the boys to the programme materials suggests not only the importance of humour as a defensive and supportive tool in the continuance of traditional hierarchies of maleness, but also the repressive nature of the boys’ compulsory ‘hard-man’ masculinity. Replete with misogynistic and homophobic references, this humour and its deployment shows a rigidly structured masculine identity, rooted in the past and heavily entrenched in their present.