Humour claims no ideological affiliation its workings merit inspection in any and every individual case in light of the who what where and when of a joke including the manner of performance the sociocultural context the dynamic amongst participants and who knows how many other factors particular to the instance. There are as many insights to be gained from the deployment of humour in performance as people to think about it so herein lie a healthy handful of responses from a variety of perspectives. For the Sake of Sanity Doing things with humour in Irish performance assembles a range of essays from practitioners academics and journalists all of whom address the attempt to make an audience laugh in various Irish contexts over the past century.