Humour, when engaged in the classroom, tends to be used as a means to hook youth into the 'real' material of school, when officially sanctioned at all. Humour can be dangerous, not-the-least in its potential to produce chaos, presenting difficulties in the rigid climate of accountability and standardisation. As we animate, humour can trouble sedimented boundaries of the 'acceptable' as youth participate in sense-making of their worlds. As we argue, this boundary play is crucial to critical literacy dispositions. This paper considers the ways in which students navigated the boundaries of Martin Luther King (MLK) and the hijab in two research projects through assemblage as a methodological experiment. Our purpose is to map the embodied entanglements of humour as a pedagogy of affect for critical literacy in diverse urban classrooms. We suggest that humour can re-contour affective terrains of literacy encounters and, thereby, the embodied possibilities for urban youth, opening spaces in the classroom for alternative senses of belonging and attachment.