By Jael Richardson
We’re wrapping up the 2025 FOLD Reading Challenge with some humour. Perhaps it’s the perfect closing challenge to a year marked by chaos and upheaval because laughter, especially when written by those who’ve lived through hardship, can be one of the most powerful forms of storytelling and a helpful path towards joy.
So often, writers from marginalized backgrounds are asked to explore pain and trauma—to tell the hard things and the difficult things in ways that are rooted in true accounts of oppression and hardship. But laughter and joy do not ignore the hard things. They simply reframe them. They give us a way to breathe, to connect, and to find common ground in the absurdity of everything happening to us and around us.
Research published by the American Psychological Association and other scholars shows that humour helps people process trauma and build empathy. It increases openness to difficult conversations. Laughing about something doesn’t mean we’re taking it lightly; it means we’re ready to engage with it differently.
For marginalized writers, humour in fiction is deeply subversive. It challenges the expectation that our art must be serious to be meaningful or tragic to be true. It lets us reclaim the fullness of our lives—the messy, complicated, joyful parts that exist right alongside the pain we have always endured.
As we wrap up 2025, this challenge reminds us that laughter is not a luxury. It’s a form of resistance, a way to say: we’re still here, and we can still find joy.
Comedy from writers from marginalized communities doesn’t make the truth more palatable, it deepens our understanding of it. It reminds us that humour is not the opposite of pain, but one of its most profound companions.
Because sometimes the most radical thing we do in the face of profound hardship—is to laugh and find joy in spite of everything.
1) Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted by Gary Barwin (Vintage Canada)
This challenge was inspired by a monumental novel that drew controversy for employing dark comedy. Gary Barwin’s Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted approached antisemitism and the Holocaust with surreal humour, demonstrating that even the most painful histories can be re-examined through imagination and wit by authors who understand the matters deeply and personally.
Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted is one of the FOLD’s 12 Books that Shaped the Way We Read.
2) Sunshine Nails edited by Mai Nguyen (Simon & Schuster)
Mai Nguyen’s Surprise Nails is a sharp and funny exploration of identity, family, and community. Nguyen’s humour is evident in the dialogue and in the small, chaotic moments that impact the Tran family, Vietnamese refugees who operate a nail salon in Toronto. Beneath the laughter, the book tackles cultural pressures, mental health, and belonging with warmth and incredible wit.
3) Never Been Better by Leanne Toshiko Simpson (HarperCollins Publishers)
Similarly, Leanne Toshiko Simpson’s Never Been Better turns a story about bipolar disorder and the friendship of patients who meet in a mental health ward and who reunite at a destination wedding into something hopeful and laugh-out-loud funny. Simpson proves that humour can coexist with heartbreak—and that sometimes, laughter is what helps us hold it all together.
4) Jameela Green Ruins Everything by Zarqa Nawaz (Douglas & McIntyre)
Zarqa Nawaz’s Jameela Green Ruins Everything is a satirical whirlwind that takes on Islamophobia, U.S. politics, and religious hypocrisy with a fearless sense of humour. Much like Nawaz’ other work, including her memoir Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, Nawaz’s novel tackles the absurdities of systemic prejudice in a way that perhaps only laughter can sustain.
The FOLD Admin