Relationship based social work practice has received increasing attention in recent years. The use of humour has infrequently been considered in relation to social work, and humour use is a neglected aspect in examining relationships in social work. As humour conveys humanity, is grounded in our earliest attachments and in the management of emotions, the purpose of this paper is to consider how humour operates in social work relationships. Importantly humour can help facilitate relationships with service users, and become a tool to help service users, social workers and their colleagues establish relationships.
With its challenges to government austerity, social work could be characterised as a subversive activity as the profession finds itself increasingly alienated from government policies, which have negatively impacted on both the profession and service users. In this context, humour can
be a mechanism for social workers to survive under increasingly challenging conditions. Some social workers use subversive forms of humour to survive as they find themselves subject to closer regulation and micromanagement. This article is based on original research into the relationship between
humour and social work. Subversive humour, with its challenges to authority, is common in jokes made by service users, who use it to challenge social work authority, and social workers, who employ subversive humour to challenge stereotypes and survive under oppressive management practices.
Both these aspects of humour are examined in relation to the contemporary context of social work in the UK.
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