Abstract

This comic essay explores how Venezuelan migrants use humour to navigate the hardships of migration, particularly along the Colombian-Venezuelan border. While migration is often depicted through tragic or dramatic imagery, this study highlights the importance of laughter and joking («joda») as a form of resistance. Humour disrupts conventional narratives, challenging the official governmental and humanitarian discourses that focus more on the appearance of generosity over effective protection. The comic essay format employed here is deliberately experimental, combining visual storytelling with academic analysis to emphasise the critical role of humour. Despite the growing interest in using comics for social research, few studies fully consider comics and humour as a tool for understanding social dynamics. This essay seeks to address this gap, drawing on over 20 months of fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2022. In doing so, it illustrates how humour enables migrants to confront contradictions in official narratives throughout their experiences