When US Vice-President Kamala Harris began to be touted as President Joe Biden’s likely successor, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump and his team wasted little time calling her “laffin’ Kamala Harris” on social media.
Subsequently, at a rally in Michigan on July 20, Trump used a similar formula: “I call her Laughing Kamala. You ever watched her laugh? She’s crazy. You know, you can tell a lot by a laugh. No, she’s crazy. She’s nuts.” The incontinent joy of this woman was, Trump and his people surely wanted to suggest, the mark of her lack of authority, a clear sign of her incompetence.
It is not just Trump and his team who have associated wisdom and authority with gravitas, or the absence of laughter: the link between seriousness and authority has a long history.
“Le Sage ne rit qu’en tremblant” (the wise man never laughs but he trembles), wrote French poet Charles Baudelaire in his 1855 essay The Essence of Laughter. Baudelaire was paraphrasing the French theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet.
The poet went on to explain that wise people are afraid to laugh because they suspect a “secret contradiction” between wisdom and laughter. After all, wrote Baudelaire, Jesus Christ never laughed.
As the New York Times comedy critic put it in his piece on Trump’s line of attack: “The case against laughing is that it makes a leader come off as less serious.”
There is another reason too, though, why Harris’s opponents thought that such jibes would harm her: they thought they would make her look not just unserious but also ridiculous. In other words, Trump’s team were hoping that the jokes and viral video clips of Kamala laughing would not just undermine voters’ faith in Harris’s leadership abilities, but also encourage people to laugh scornfully at her.
But Trump and his allies may have misunderstood what they were dealing with. This is where they could learn something from Baudelaire and other thinkers.
The kind of laughter that Baudelaire called “ordinary” was theorised by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. This is laughter prompted by the sight of someone tripping and falling. What makes us laugh, in Hobbes’ view, is the recognition of our own superiority to the person we see falling.
This view of laughter is echoed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, in his book Le Rire (Laughter, 1990). For Bergson, we laugh at other people when they behave like mechanically operated things, and we do this as a kind of socialisation exercise – to encourage them to be more obviously human.
The superiority theory of laughter explains why we laugh at other people’s stupidity or at clowns. However, when laughter is used as a political weapon it is important to remember two things.
The first is the complicated relationship between humour and sympathy. This was a favourite theme of the 19th-century novelist and would-be dramatist Stendhal, who struggled to write funny characters for the stage and page. This difficulty was partly, he believed, because sympathy had a habit of getting in the way of scorn.
Humour creates sympathetic connections between people who share the joke, but the joke often relies on an audience feeling no sympathy for the object of the joke. The problem is that if the butt of the joke is herself laughing, as in Harris’s case, this creates a problem: our scorn is likely to be overridden by our sympathy with the person laughing. In other words, we may find ourselves laughing with, rather than at, the laugher.
If it is true that we can laugh with rather than at others, this relates to the second important drawback of using laughter as a political weapon: this is the power of joy – a word that is recurrent in political commentary and social media posts on the subject of Harris’s laughter.
Harris has, it seems, a very finely honed sense of the ridiculous, as suggested for example by the pleasure she took in her now famous coconut tree anecdote. Baudelaire associated a sense of the ridiculous with a second kind of laughter, which he called “the grotesque.” This is distinct from the ordinary, mocking type of humour.
Grotesque laughter is the vertiginous sort that overtakes us when we get a sudden glimpse of our own absurdity, our utter ridiculousness. This fleeting insight is itself a kind of indirect proof of our self-awareness and therefore our superiority, not this time relative to other people, but instead relative to nature.
Baudelaire wrote about the hilarity produced in him when he saw a decapitated English pantomime clown run around the stage before shoving his head in his pocket. Some of us may have felt something similar when we saw Marie-Antoinette holding her own singing head in her lap at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.
This is laughter as a celebration of our irredeemable human silliness. It is as close as we can get to childish, innocent joy, and it can be triggered by a recognition of absurdity.
Laughter, whether of the mocking or joyful kind, can also be triggered by the sight of a seriousness that seems inappropriate. Baudelaire noted in his essay on laughter that “the most comic of animals are also the most serious”.
Seriousness, then, can be a mark of wisdom, but it can also indicate that someone is unaware of how absurd they really are. Harris’s team seem to have understood this: they are now busy highlighting Trump’s “weird” seriousness.
Drawing attention to Kamala Harris’s joy was a major tactical error on the part of the team around Trump, a man whose laughter, assuming it exists at all, is of the ordinary, and very far from innocent, kind. Indeed, there is a very real risk now that Trump’s laughter-free demeanour will play against him, positioning him no longer as authoritative but as risible.
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Maria C. Scott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
