My ambition here is not to give a firm answer to the eternal question why man laughs. Just like love, humor remains an unsolvable mystery. We do not know why we love someone, just as we do not know what the source of humor is. Man does not know why he loves someone. Man does not know why he laughs at something or someone. And that is a good thing. Life without secrets would be infinitely boring.

Still, if not humor itself, we can identify what humor carries. Humor, just like art (and art and humor are often united), presents a vision of the world, one view of life.

This paper is an attempt to analyze humor in Middle European animation illustrated by the example of two characteristic films created within the Zagreb school of animation.

Already over the first decades of the twentieth century, film animation appeared in almost all middle European countries. Still, the golden age of this medium in this region lasted from the 1950s to the end of 1970s. After World War II, a significant number of animated film studios were founded in the region producing innovative and fresh art of animation often recognized at international film festivals.

There was no middle European equivalent of Popeye or Superman. Much like in regional literature and visual humor, in animation too there were heroes who were not heroes. Leading characters in middle European animation were often characterized by the “Schweikian” anomaly: little man, who felt like a looser, bearing no illusions towards the presence or the future.