The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how five middle school students examined humor and characterization used in adolescent literature according to Louise Rosenblatt's (1995) reader response transactional theory. The study was conducted with a focus group of five 6th-grade students, three girls and two boys, from a public middle school language arts classroom in the Southwest region of the United States. The guiding question for the study was: In what ways do selected middle school students talk about the connections between humor and characterization in response to adolescent literature? Methods for data collection included semistructured interviews and transcripts of audiotaped and videotaped literature circle discussions. The students read the adolescent literature both efferently and aesthetically (Rosenblatt, 1995) as they attended to humor, thus setting conditions for engaging the humor. To begin, if the situation in the text was the result of superiority humor, where the focus group members could predict the targeted character would be hurt, disappointed, or promote a negative change in the character's development, then they would not engage in the humor. Additionally, if the humor was closely related to the students' world of understanding, then the humor was embraced only after careful deliberation. Finally, if the characters presented themselves as resilient and unaffected by the humor, then the students were willing to laugh at the characters. (Contains 1 table.)