In modern America, nothing should die a quicker death than laughter. A callous and idle action, the need to mock and entertain has spilled out in every direction to create a culture of cruelty and a counterculture of mirthlessness. The pridefulness and insecurity that bringing about laughter entails has poisoned a society without shame into shaming its members, impelling us to critique the deeply rooted vanity that enables us to laugh at each other. As the saying goes, laughter is cheap medicine, and in troubling times such as these, laughing will not make our society any more whole.
The Western world cannot conceive of modern life without laughter. In a liberal, individualist society, laughter is a necessary evil. To stake a claim for oneself in the world, an individual must delineate who they are and where and with whom they stand, to free themselves from the tyranny of the group but also to attach themselves willfully to it. This, in philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1911 treatise Laughter, is exemplified by the role of the comic. The comic is the arch-individual, the instigator of social rupture through joke-telling, whose renegade interventions demand and create an audience. This position is defined by a “callousness to social life,” a sort of asociality paradoxically and inexorably bound to social life for its matter and form. The comic is a parasite, and joking is nothing more than the public drawing of blood, which we lap up when we laugh. Yet like blood, Bergson writes, “the substance is scanty, and the after-taste bitter,” and we find ourselves alienated, seeking more, adrift and destabilized in the asocial world of the comic.
Joke-telling and laughter are thus peculiar, and like all peculiarities, socially noxious. At once, they destabilize the social order by bisecting it into those who laugh and those who are laughed at, an unsteady and inconstant dynamic whose roles can be swiftly reversed. But laughter necessitates an object: this is why it is so foul. The whole situation of the joke is a stinging betrayal of social solidarity, a flagrant public dumping of a fellow member of society for one’s own elevation—at the expense of social cohesion and the dignity and unviolated personhood of the newly-isolated butt of the joke.
To laugh is a fundamental dismissal of something or someone else, a social gesture of scorn and unconcern, that at once frees us from the burden of tolerating the object (the “soul’s emancipation,” per Havelock Ellis, from persons and situations that hold one back socially), but simultaneously reduces that object to nothing more than, at best, a joke. It is a kind of self-regulating and self-strengthening preening on the part of society, as enacted by millions upon millions of disquiet individuals. As sociologist Erving Goffman theorizes in his work on interaction rituals, the “maintenance of self” depends on the “deference” of others, of their self-effacement, and making no claims to being, all the while being and humanity are ascribed more fully to the joke-teller.
The few who clear the bar of contempt are exalted for their capacities to escape judgment and hence, scorn, and are then abstracted into a good quality (one is “funny” or “hot”). The rest who fail to clear the bar are sentenced to the ignominy of existential irrelevance, an open dismemberment into a pure, laughable attribute. In any given social space—the locker room, the playground, the canteen—the accusation of otherness is always levied whenever people assemble and form a group. Those who are accepted are subsumed into amorphous relevance of generic being (one is cool, we are elite), those who are not are made into a demonstrative object of rank peculiarity (one is a cripple, they are whores). Being part of something and being a so-and-so are hard and fast differences one learns early on while running the gauntlet of perpetual trial by peers. The joke, troublingly, results in the pronouncement of a judgment that other, necessarily imperfect humans are not morally equipped or entitled to make: the elevation or humiliation of another fallible person, at the expense of a unified, unremarkable social mass. Laughter unifies by dividing, and we, as individuals, fall into moral infirmity by taking on its fleeting power.
Laughter has traditionally been understood in two ways: relief from the unseemly, either in its reflection of the undesirable or its bewildering absurdity. Ultimately, these are the same response. When we laugh, Bergson argues, we are saying that the object of our laughter and its existence do not worry or concern us. A theory of superiority, as advanced by classical thinkers like Hobbes and Aristotle, maintains that we laugh to demonstrate the perceived unsuitability of our perceived object within our understanding of the world and, by extension, our social fitness and well-being. The peculiar is absurd, because it does not belong. Laughter establishes this fact. Laughter is the pointing finger, and we are all the target.
On the one hand, then, laughter is fundamentally oppressive. In a literal sense of the word, it presses against and pushes down its object. As Aristotle puts it rather bluntly in the Poetics, “comedy is an imitation [μίμησις]… of some defect or ugliness.” This system of imitation, mimesis, is elsewhere used by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett for a fundamental principle of “Universal Darwinism”: a processual way of mental natural selection in which some ideas and their propagators are cut down, and others replicated and exalted.
For Aristotle, the imitation of something “distorted” (διεστραμμένον or that which cannot stand), of an imperfect reality, appears to us hilarious. He takes pains to note that before we thought it comic, it was rightly tragic, all ridiculousness “passing unnoticed” within the broader, tragic sweep of the epic poem, man’s first “imitation” of the natural and unnatural. The appearance of an undesirable trait in nature, which we all possess, is no longer tragic to the modern, comic observer for whom life is no longer inherently and consistently doleful. We no longer feel open sympathy (the emotional cornerstone of tragedy) but instead, a kind of self-recognizing and self-preserving revulsion that steers us away from the tragic element in life and in ourselves. Hobbes writes in Leviathan that “grimaces called laughter” are formed “by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof [we] suddenly applaud [our]selves.” Laughter pushes down to push ourselves up, away from the thing that we have recognized as pathetic and laughable, a reminder of our fragility and mortality.
Our individualism is bolstered by our constant flight from weakness and disorder, yet we cannot support an individualist lifestyle without the crutch of others’ company. Thus, we fall back on society to sift out of it the miserable, hapless individual, creating absurd half-beings out of friends and neighbors to bolster ourselves against our own defective attempts at fitting in. If there is one who fits in less than the rest of us, they must be stamped out lest they remind us and others of our own deviance—and then, in that moment, we run. As we laugh, we act calculatedly and avert the risk of conspicuousness and get out of the way of the all-discerning eye of society, having trapped someone else in its sights.
On the other hand, then, it is also a means of escapism from oppression. It is, however, a shoddy escape. By laughing at someone else, the oppressed person transfers the weight and sting of marginality onto someone else, without really ridding themselves of that burden. One can never, Bergson contends, actually throw off the “strain of living” but for a durée, a blip in time granted to us by the freedom of laughter. There is temporary relief to be found, Hobbes notes, in “observing the imperfections of other men,” as it puts one man momentarily at ease about his own imperfections. But this does nothing more than perpetuate the need to unshackle himself from the reminder of his own imperfections and hand over that burden to something else. So goes the endless, nerve-wracking hot potato of social culpability. All liberal society is engaged in this endeavor, politely handing off the indecency of difference to one’s inferiors, a circle of dependence that can only last as long as we choose to sustain it. From then on, the ice breaks and we all fall out of civility and into the hyena’s mouth.
Laughter, as Bergson often notes, creates “transformation.” It does not, however, transform its world for the better. Laughter points out the wretched among us, picks apart the social fabric to find those who least belong, and reduces society to a patchwork of individuals temporarily united in the perverse solidarity of staring at and dehumanizing others. Socialization by laughter eliminates the need for a stable community; a joke forms a group each time it is told by the mere presentation of infirmity—some are human and whole, and others are nothing. When a joke no longer appeals, the alliances formed by and around the joke cease to exist, impelling the constant and desperate creation of laughter, like short-form social media content, to keep others interested and convinced of one’s personal worth.
It is this insecurity that has propelled us into a new era of humor. Community has become even more disparate, the individual’s position within society unstable through the digital world and its promise of automation. To reassure our way out of the absurd, we have taken to wounding each other in the physical and digital and nothing has exemplified this dynamic better than the rise to power of the far right.
When Elon Musk and others on the far right complain of limitations on jokes and call to “legalize comedy,” it is nothing more than a clamoring towards societal disruption and open, exclusive animus. After years of being the victims of dull left-wing humor, the right, with all its bitter vengeance, has swept down to mock American society into submission. Musk and his ideological allies seek to point their fingers, to determine who makes the cut into society and who will be flattened down, and to isolate society’s most unwelcome even further in a position of nonbeing. Bullying and suicide rates are on the rise, no doubt propelled by the shift in the American political climate towards open intolerance.
To the far right, there is nothing wrong in this. In a Darwinian sense, Bergson grimly describes laughter as a winnowing social “mechanism,” a deterministic act that seeks at exclusion in the realm of individuals but “correction” on the level of the social. Laughter homogenizes its audience: those who laugh get into line, those who are laughed at are booted out. The ideologues of the new far right, as one finds in any fascistic movement, have elevated homogeneity and social fitness from beyond a latent pillar of society to a key initiative in the grand scheme of Making America Great.
The President speaks this initiative into reality through half-jokes and gives his enemies brutally comic names. His advisors and ideological assistants speak to the public through biting humor and regulate the government and economy through sardonic puns. His base floods the internet with trolling; the meme itself has become proper to Rightists. Laughter, at its most corrosive and corrupted, is now everywhere, weaponized by the federal government to whip America into shape as the object of their humor. The government is the comic, the American populace the laughed-at, and society hangs in the balance: the laugher is brought into the fold of the government and the object of laughter left with no place in American society. The galling othering of laughter has made half of the country a stranger to itself, as the government molds the remaining portion of society into its own triumphing image. And yet, America is unhappy. Unresponsive. Isolated. The Union without unity is a broken abyss and we must ditch the divisiveness of laughter to crawl our way out.
The Left has responded to this crisis with its usual mirthlessness, with puritanism, and with joylessness, for the Right has staked its claim over laughter. But what then of joy? Joy, the positive recognition of the other, the sympathy and celebration of the triumph of the other is what we need as a society. Joy does not need laughter and should thrive independent of it. Joy in the well-being of the stranger, of one’s neighbor, one’s opponent, can protect against the fraying of social ties the laughter of the current administration provokes. The joy of the Greek philosophers and of Bergson is a state of flourishing, of existence with purpose, for others and with others. More specifically for Bergson, it is an act of spiritual vitality—joy and creation in his conception of the world are one and the same, a spiritual redevelopment of and reckoning with the surrounding world.
Joy is the creation of life, not the segregation or separation of it from itself, without grimaces, without accusations, without glory. Joy does not stake a claim for the individual, but for life itself and for the world at large. Everyone and everything can be collected within it, and all experience can be contained within it as it creates a unity of life in the constructive fellowship of others. This is how America can be saved from disunion, from the treason of laughter and the fowler’s snare of rootless, reactionary transformation: through a new life founded in joy. But the joke, and the cruel laughter it begets, should die a quick and quiet death, out of sight and out of mind.
Image: Leonardo Alenza y Nieto, He Will Not Laugh, pen and dark brown ink, 1807–45 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)