Humour at the Crab Museum: Funniness, Ethics and Political Activism

This article considers the importance of humour in the Crab Museum, Margate, UK. This unconventional cultural space describes itself as a small, independent science museum and a baffling tourist attraction. It uses joking to educate, engage debate on urgent environmental issues and entertain. We use original research interviews with the museum’s creators, analysis of comedy within the museum’s exhibits and activities, and ethical theorising to explore the functions that humour serves within the museum. We begin by drawing out key functions of humour identified in interviews with the museum’s directors: 1) humour as a means to increase engagement with the museum, especially by building community; 2) humour as a means to communicate distasteful truths; and 3) humour as a means to engage critical thinking and disrupt habits of thought around existing hierarchies of knowledge. We apply theory on comedy as critique and comic licence to discern the social and political significance of these activities. Finally, we use ethical theorising, exploring the meta-ethics of the crab museum’s joking. We conclude that joking can, itself, form a practice of ethics.