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Tuesday
“Donald Trump will lose his war on laughter,” writer Andy Borowitz recently declared after CBS fired Late Show’s Stephen Colbert to curry favor with the president. Like pretty much every dictator in the world, Borowitz points out, Trump is terrified of laughter because comedy “is the kryptonite of autocrats”:
They rule by intimidation, and when we laugh at them, their power to scare us evaporates. As Mark Twain wrote in The Mysterious Stranger, “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
Borowitz’s mention of Twain’s bleak work got me to reread it for the first time since high school, when it freaked me out. An optimist at my core, I was shaken by Twain’s dark view of the human race, which is conveyed to us from the vantage point of Satan. This “mysterious stranger” reveals that the history of humankind is an unbroken string of mass killings, grisly executions, and mob violence, much of it propelled by religious fanaticism. “He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life, more devastating in their engines of war, than any we had seen,” the narrator reports.
Before looking at how laughter can be an antidote, check out the following passage, which captures only too well the behavior of Trump cultists, especially those who condone—or at least fail to oppose—the immigrant concentration camps:
I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don’t dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them.
I think of those people who report their Spanish speaking neighbors to ICE. Twain’s own example is witch denunciations:
Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed.
Satan explains that we tolerate such evil because we fear what our neighbors will say if we object:
“Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race—the individual’s distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety’s or comfort’s sake, to stand well in his neighbor’s eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.”
Integral to this process of mindless conformity is self-deception, a process that social media appears to be accelerating. Satan says that the human race has
duped itself from cradle to grave with shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its entire life a sham. Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one. It regarded itself as gold, and was only brass.
Laughter, however, could be our savior, although in saying this Satan must distinguish between two kinds of laughter. Laughing at “low-grade commonalities,” which is to say grotesqueries and absurdities, is only mongrel laughter. I think of how Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan talks of people using laughter to assert their superiority over others, perhaps by laughing at their deformities. An example would be the 2015 rally where Trump imitated and mocked New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from arthrogryposis.
On the other hand, that laughter which pokes fun at “high-grade comicalities” can save us. Satan challenges humanity to “detect the funniness” of our inane behavior and laugh at it. If we do, we will be using one of our most effective weapons. At this point, Satan delivers the line quoted by Borowitz:
Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
Then, in a further satiric twist, Satan says that, of course, we never think to use this weapon:
Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.
So here’s to all those courageous comedians who speak truth to power. At the moment they’ve got a colossal humbug on their hands and need to keep us laughing at it.
