They joked about dying.
Not because it was funny, but because it was the only way to survive it.
In the trenches of the First World War, soldiers turned fear into sarcasm and horror into humour. Shellfire became “just a bit of a strafe.” Terror was softened into “the wind up.” And sometimes, a wound meant a darkly joked-about “ticket home.”
But it went further than that.
They wrote parody songs, shared lewd jokes, printed trench newspapers, and even composed poetic odes to rum: small acts of defiance against a world coming apart.
This episode explores the humour that lived alongside the mud, the fear, and the constant threat of death, and what it reveals about the men who endured it.
Because in the trenches, humour wasn’t about laughter.
It was about survival.
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