Politically Incorrect Immigrants and the (Un)Funny Business of Becoming Civilized: Integration with a Smirk

In the current traffic of global exchange, some things, like austerity models and start-up culture, cross borders easily, but humor often gets flagged at customs. Migration studies have rarely treated humor as a central analytic, and when they do, it is framed in uniformly positive terms of integration or resilience, leaving its ambivalent and risk-laden dimensions underexamined. This study responds by following 51 Iranian migrants in Finland and Estonia to ask how humor becomes a gatekeeping test, a sanctionable misstep, and a medium for tactical pushback. Using focus groups and one-to-one interviews, the article traces four recurring movements: (1) humor as test and ticket to inclusion and belonging, (2) humor as a source of stigma and self-censorship, (3) humor as the super-ego of the migrant self, and (4) humor as low-risk resistance and a site for subversion. The comparison between the two settings shows Finland’s sharper institutional responses to offense and Estonia’s looser, socially mediated boundaries. The article advances Eliasian sociology in both humor and migration studies and develops the idea of a micro-civilizing process that compresses long arcs of social learning into immediate interaction (including a surplus effect that redirects civility toward the host society), with humor registering accelerated adjustment across days and months rather than generations.