What appears striking about Jonathan Coe’s humour in The Rotters’ Club (2001) is how different or separate it is from postmodernism’s textual or ontological playfulness such as defined by Linda Hutcheon, Lance Olsen or Patrick O’Neil. The Rotters’ Club is, among others, a social and historical novel bent on recording the noble and futile battles of the 1970s in England and its humour is then constantly related to a ruthless assessment of the past and to the loss of a series of sustaining illusions. Surprisingly, humour seems to function primarily as a narrative red-herring for the light tonality of the opening chapters leaves the reader totally unprepared for one of the characters’ violent death from an IRA bombing. Not black but bleak, Coe’s humour following this tragic incident eases the didacticism of a novel striving to recapture the particular politics, culture and mores of a bygone era. The bitterness of lost illusions, social as well as romantic, may explain the ambiguity of the novel’s humour, a politeness of despair displayed so as to laugh in order to avoid crying. It will be the purpose of this paper then to try and unravel the complexity of The Rotters’ Club’s humour, desperate yet humanist, cynical yet committed.