For artists, humour is one of the most important strategies to deal critically with social and political issues and to explore the potentials of social change. Parody, play and the carnivalesque are forms of criticism that both artists and activists from political and social movements use in order to gain public attention. This is how Dadaism reacted to the insanity of WWI, how Situationism responded to the post-war crisis of modernity, and how net-activists respond to the new structures of a globalised world. By means of humour they rebel against the limited views of a realism whose only concern Is functionality, not consequences. They unmask the media's fixation with the spectacular and protest against new judicial and political restrictions, as well as against all attempts to limit the freedom of expression. For the politically-committed arts, humour is a means of survival.