Making sense of urban space, interpreting its visible material, spatial, economic and socio-political sides but also its “underneath of things” (Ferme 2001) demands from urban dwellers particular skills, forms of knowledge and social practices in order to get along.

This talk zooms in to laughter, and humour as its social interpretation, as something genuinely social, often provoked as an effect of the ambiguity of lived experience. By referring to two diverse urban environments: Cartagena de Indias in Colombia and Goma in Eastern DR Congo, I attend in particular to the nexus of urbanity, (social) infrastructures, and practices of humour. By highlightening different case studies, I aim at building new theoretical approaches in order to understand how changing forms of urban landscapes shape sociality in my two research contexts as well as urban life more generally.