Humor, Identity, and Belonging

Chapter 1 Introduction

As this volume deals with humor in the particular setting of intercultural interaction, my instinct is to begin by referencing “our globalizing world.” However, such an introduction is used so frequently in the wide, interdisciplinary literature on intercultural encounters that it has become something of a cliché. There are, of course, good reasons for wanting to understand how people from different cultures interact, and many of those reasons are indeed due to increased contact between people of different backgrounds in “our globalizing world.” In Japan, for instance, the number of foreign residents increased from 1.6 million in 2010 to 2.3 million in 2020 (Ministry of Justice 2022), during which period Japanese individuals ...