This book explores the power of subversive laughter and ridicule in the German, French, and British colonies during the period of high imperialism between 1884 and 1947. It provides the first book-length historical analysis of the origins and effects of anti-colonial humor from a comparative and global perspective. A Global History of Anti-Colonial Humor focuses on the German-ruled colonies of Togo and Namibia, on French-ruled Vietnam, and on British India, while also considering the activities of anti-colonialists who left those territories to work for their cause in Europe.

Daniel Brückenhaus convincingly argues that anti-colonial humor played an important role in delegitimizing the European colonial empires by laying open the contrast between imperial ideology and the realities of colonial rule. He shows how anti-colonial laughter evoked fear and paranoia in the colonial administrators, whose state of mind was often anxious and brittle, given how small their numbers were compared to the colonized populations surrounding them. This led them to react to subversive humor in repressive and frequently brutal ways. Brückenhaus reveals that the reactions of the colonizers often backfired, as they betrayed the hollowness of their claim to be benevolent and civilized rulers, and as they allowed anti-colonialists to make this very repression an additional target of this humor.