Do you know a funny fairy tale? And please forget the cute sidekicks added in Disney movies - I am talking about the original story line here! Maybe you will, after some deliberation, come up with something like "Puss in Boots," but in general, the "typical" fairy tale seems to be rather serious than funny. Which is strange, because when you go through fairy tale collections like Grimms Märchen, there is actually a great wealth of funny tales, ridiculing foolish behavior, celebrating the resourcefulness of underdogs, and sometimes delighting in outright nonsense. These traits have fascinated authors from German Romanticism until the present and inspired them to write funny literary fairy tales. In this course, we will engage with such texts focusing on the German tradition, but also including Italian, French, and Scandinavian folk and literary fairy tales (in German translation, since the course will be conducted in German). We will analyze the techniques of humor deployed in them, and will ask what they tell us about social norms and repressed frustrations, desires, and hopes.