Laughing off Ebola in Sierra Leone: Humor in Times of Crisis

ABSTRACT The West African Ebola epidemic of 2013 to 2016 resulted in a long-term state of emergency and dramatic changes to everyday life. Despite it being a challenging period, humor was still part of social interactions and exchanges. Periods of crisis can lend themselves well to humor due to the fact that both crisis and humor find their foundations in absurdity. This article seeks to build on existing work by looking at humor as a form of production, focusing on how it functioned in different, simultaneous and contradictory terms in social and political life during the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. Drawing on fieldwork from Sierra Leone between 2014 and 2020, this article traces how humor worked in practice in relation to social cohesion, as a way of negotiating uncertainty, and analyses the symbolic role it played in interactions between survivors and non-survivors. Finally, it analyses how humor has helped re-frame experiences since the epidemic ended. I argue that humor plays multiple and tangible roles, and can shape social relations during and after times of crisis.