"This is ridiculous": Laughter, humour and the receipt of welfare.

In this article, I consider humour and laughter as a response to welfare practices, specifically in a New Zealand context. Analysing data from focus group interviews with 64 New Zealand lone mothers receiving welfare, I consider the laughter that accompanied accounts of being badly treated by welfare staff and frustrated by administrative practices surrounding the pursuit of financial assistance. My analysis focuses on the "affective practices" (Wetherell, 2012, p.12) of focus group participants as they spoke about accessing their welfare entitlements. Notions of movement and transformation are integral to the analysis, which considers how laughter moved the women and moved between them, creating a sense of group cohesion. I propose that laughing about difficult situations in relation to welfare receipt offered participants a way of responding to their experiences and, ultimately, a new way of feeling about these encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]