Kamala’s Laugh: Risibility, Homo Ridens, and the Hope of “Good Riddance”

You might say that laughter has gotten us into this mess.  Well, I am saying it, and I, though hypergelastically inclined (meaning laughter-prone) in my youth, am not laughing much at and about this present moment in time.  By “mess”—an understatement, surely—I mean the state of global politics, and the state of our political discourse in particular.

Could laughter—supposedly the best medicine—also get us out of this mess? Might it be a symptom of our ailment as well as its cure? Not, I venture, if we carry on trying to laugh it all off.  In the act of trivializing matters in hopes of dematerializing danger by declaring it risible, we run the risk of nixing democracy—a system predicated on the willingness to listen—altogether, throwing it away with a hearty tossing back of our heads in a communal display of hilarity.  A ditch, after all, is not called a ha-ha for nothing.

Whether it be salubrious, harmless or deleterious; a sign of exuberance and joy or of downright anarchy; whether it be infantile (meaning pre-verbal) or bespeaking our assumed superiority, a mean force of deriding what we have demeaned or a means of making light of what we perceive and dread as darkness, laughter as a natural response—a release of pent-up energy—and social phenomenon has been the subject of debate for centuries.  In fact, the meaning of sniggers, cackles and giggles continues to be mulled over to this day.

At this moment—my negligible contribution to the discussion being a response to a CNN article on the 2024 Presidential Election in the United States—the Republican nominee and his presumptive Democrat opponent are being contrasted not in policy matters only— the ex-President’s demeanor and his strategies of demeaning his adversaries having been scrutinized for years—but in terms of their capacity and proclivity for laughter.

Laughter has long been the subject of the most humorless treatise, many of them I studied as a graduate when I dabbled in comic theory.  For instance, Herbert Spencer, in the “The Physiology of Laughter” (1860), argued that laughter, which appears to be purposeless behavior, has important physiological benefits to the species, homo ridens—the laughing human.  Not that laughter is an exclusively human trait.  Any chimp can do it; but it does tend to make us more human to one another.

Not that Lord Chesterfield would have agreed.  “In my mind,” the English statesman and man of letters wrote in 1748, “there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.”  Well, pardon my manners, but that is laughable, as is Chesterfield’s observation that “the vulgar often laugh, but never smile, whereas well-bred people often smile, and seldom or never laugh.”  Clearly, he did not anticipate the vulgarity of an agelast (that is, someone who does not laugh) like the ex-President seeking to win the election this year. Does laughing less make anyone more of a statesperson? Perhaps, if by statesperson you mean “egomaniacal bully.”  

The “passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.”  That is what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes declared in Human Nature (1650).  If it were, then why is the cocksure Republican candidate, smugly convinced of his own “eminency,” not laughing?

According to CNN, his niece and arch enemy, Mary, has provided a reasoned and, on the surface of it, reasonable answer: “Laughing is to make yourself vulnerable, it’s to let down your guard in some way, it’s to lose a little bit of control.”  And ‘[t]hat is not allowed to happen.”  We should know by now that a lack of laughter does not translate into self-discipline, seriousness, let alone sincerity.  Feral shouts and illiterate rants are no more Presidential than the bearing of teeth in the act of laughing.

Perhaps, we need not ditch laughter as much as we need to knock on the head whatever sinks us into the hole of despair.  That said, we need to be on guard about laughter that sets us apart instead of bringing us together, including the calculated, disingenuous and often misfiring mirth of Vice-Presidential candidate JD Vance, whose tone-deafness and lack of relatability is confounding Republicans, causing initial enthusiasm to give way to doubt as to the shrewdness of the ex-Presidents’ choice of running mate.  Looks who’s laughing now!

Whereas the former, potentially future and possibly final democratically elected President cheerlessly dispenses vitriol designed to elicit riotous responses from devotees whose readymade euphoria reminds us that “fan” is short for “fanatic,” his adversary appears intent on cracking up the invisible wall between the singular public speaker and the listening multitude in the spirit of convivial merriment: all joking aside, I am with you, she seems to say, without so many words; and the laugh I am having on this matter is meant to be the last, or at least lasting.

If you must be joking, you might as well be laughing.  Is that it? But what exactly are or should be we be laughing at? Or for? Surely, that should matter as much, if not more, than the sounds of our getting carried away.

A laugh does not just fall out of a coconut tree.  Guffaws are inseparable from the gaffes or gallows that elicit them.  And, chortle all you want, a chuckle can be a noisy reminder of how precariously close we have come to permitting an aging and, dare I say, superannuated agelast to chuck the rights, human and civil, of a citizenry that, as the right-wing candidate made plain, might not enjoy the liberty to cast another vote hereafter.

Don’t make me laugh! we might say in disdain when we reject an idea as ridiculous; but laughter, especially the hearty laugh of a formidable woman, can be intimidating to the point of being sneered at as a sign of “hysteria,” to use a patriarchal pejorative of yore that, I suspect, still retains currency in some reactionary pockets that Republicans know are ripe for the picking.

No one “who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad,” the eminent Victorian Thomas Carlyle opined.  I am not sure that theory holds true.  Would we look upon the Führer as less contemptible if he had laughed? Does the quality of mirth not depend on the circumstances as well as the character of the laugher?

If its aim is to be amiable, laughter can serve as a tonic, a restorative of good will in an age in which wit, or whatever goes for it these days, is becoming increasingly divisive.  Laughter, not unlike a sneeze, is a natural way of getting something unwanted out of a compromised system.  And nothing resonates with me more these days than the imperative of “good riddance.”