Historically, Islam is not a religion that has been always been associated with humour; for example, much more has been written about Jewish humour than Muslim humour. In article for the Guardian in 2007, Sarfraz Mansoor stated that ‘Muslim comedy sounds, to many, like an oxymoron’. Furthermore, Khalid Kishtainy began his 1985 book Arab Political Humour by recalling that several of his friends ‘felt a shudder at the thought of tackling the sense of humour of the Prophet Muhammad and the holy imams of Islam’. Despite the nature of these comments, recent decades have provided much reason to challenge the idea that humour is less compatible with Islam than it is with other religions. Indeed, Jean-Jacques Schmidt argues in Le Livre de l’humour arabe that Muslims in Arab societies are more humorous than is often imagined:

As this chapter develops, we will see that the universality of humour is a topic evoked by several leading Muslim comedians when discussing their performances. This will show that many Muslim performers are seeking to articulate their vision in a means that is in keeping with French Republican values rather than the more problematic humour communautaire discussed in this book's introduction. Before proceeding further, however, it is worth asking how it has come to be that Islam is at times perceived as a religion lacking in humour. Among the prime reasons are many non-Muslims’ lack of awareness of Islam, and a tendency for the media in many non-Muslim countries to focus on the sensational by concentrating on the actions of the most extreme followers of Islam.