2 Laugh or not 2 love

Views and evaluations of humour are governed by sociocultural assumptions about what humour is, how it works, and where its limits lie. These assumptions are shaped by various forces, including states’ political histories, sociopolitical views and identities, humour traditions, and more. All these factors inform popular humour ideologies—sets of beliefs and attitudes—about what humour is and how it works or should not work. In a sense, humour ideologies represent a spectrum of attitudes toward humour. This spectrum spans from the benign “just a joke” perspective, through positive evaluations of humour as a means of social criticism, resistance, and change, to severe criticism of humour as a tool that exacerbates social divisions, reproduces inequalities, and perpetuates discourses of racism and gender discrimination. The latter perspective has dominated American and Western European scholarship on disparagement humour. Within this context, our goal is to analyse material (humour ideologies) distinct from what these research trends typically rely upon. Our focus in this study is on the evaluations and attitudes toward humour held by Macedonian citizens. By analysing this material, we aim to demonstrate the contextual dependence of humour ideologies on specific political histories, power relations, and humour traditions.