Linking humour to teaching seems a daunting task, whatever approach one chooses. Many obstacles occur: funny, playful exercises are supposed to be too easy (and it remains to be seen whether they are truly amusing), teachers who use humour in class are suspected to be utterly demagogical creatures and, finally, humour is considered as a potential lethal weapon within academia. That might explain why research about humour and teaching is so scarce; and why researchers in humour and teaching are so often at cross purposes with each other. However, humour acts as a facilitator, and that is mostly true as far as teaching foreign languages is concerned - even though the results are often difficult to establish precisely.