On humour, art and the temptation to believe it is always on the side of good

In times of tension, a reasonable hope is often repeated: that we need more humour. That in the face of dogma, the trenches and angry solemnity, laughter could restore some air, some distance, some shared humanity. I share the impulse. Yet I have learned to distrust it, for it conceals a false premise: that humour is, by its nature, on the side of good. It is not. Humour does not have a single sign, and to believe that it does is the primary error of any defence of humour in difficult times.

I wish to maintain something more uncomfortable and, I believe, more useful: that humour is ambivalent by structure, not by accident. The same form—irony, caricature, the meme—serves to open a doubt or to close ranks, to disarm the powerful or to humiliate the vulnerable. What determines its effect is not that it is humour. It is something else, and it is prudent to know what that is.

1. Laughter is born divided

One need only look at the classical theories of humour to see that ambivalence is at its root. Hobbes described laughter as a “sudden glory”: the pleasure of feeling superior to the weakness, the defect or the ridiculousness of another. That theory wonderfully explains the caricature that degrades the tyrant by deforming his body—but it explains with equal precision the joke that dehumanises a minority. The laughter of superiority serves to bring down those who are above and to trample those who are below. It is the same mechanism; the target changes.

Freud provided another facet: humour as discharge, as a psychic economy that allows one to state obliquely what cannot be stated directly. This makes it a precious instrument for processing fear and circumventing censorship. Yet the same discharge fuels the contrary suspicion—that laughing relieves tension without transforming anything, that one unburdens oneself and remains unchanged. And the incongruity of Kant and Schopenhauer, the laughter that erupts when an expectation is suddenly undone, explains Dadaist montage and the absurd, but it does not take anyone's side: it is a mechanics of surprise, not a moral compass.

Not even the carnival, that festival of the inversion of order which Bakhtin turned into an emblem of popular comic culture, is unequivocally liberating. The objection is old and solid: the carnival may be tolerated by power precisely because it is a regulated exception which, upon ending, confirms the return of order. One is permitted to laugh for a day in order to better obey for the rest of the year. Transgression, viewed in this light, does not always subvert: sometimes it merely provides ventilation.

2. What the history of comic art teaches, and what it does not

Visual satire has a glorious genealogy, and it is prudent to view it without idealising it. Goya, in Los Caprichos, attacked superstition and the inquisitorial machinery with a freedom that still impresses. Daumier represented King Louis Philippe as a grotesque Gargantua who devoured wealth, and he paid for it with imprisonment. George Grosz flayed the militarism and corruption of the Weimar Republic with his pencil, and ended up in the Nazi “degenerate art” exhibition, stripped of his nationality.

These cases prove something important: power perceives satire as a real threat, sufficient to imprison, seize and proscribe. But they also prove the opposite of what we would like. The satire of Grosz did not stop Nazism. That of Daumier did not topple the July Monarchy. Its diagnostic power—its capacity to name what was happening—was enormous; its capacity to halt it, scarce or non-existent. And when one seeks firm evidence that critical humour changed institutions, it does not appear: what research documents is circulation, repression and recorded dissent, not caused transformation.

The same occurs with humour under dictatorships. The political jokes that circulated in Communist Europe, the samizdat, the pages of La Codorniz circumventing Francoist censorship: all of that was silent protest, complicity, an emotional archive of fear and of what could not be said. But the historian who studied it most thoroughly concluded that those jokes neither toppled nor stabilised the regimes. They recorded the distance between the people and the official discourse. They did not close it.

3. The best argument against: the valve that does not burst

Here is the objection that any honest defence of humour must sustain before responding to it. It is the safety-valve thesis: critical humour appears to challenge the order, yet it actually discharges the tension that might otherwise have translated into action, thereby assisting in the toleration of the intolerable. One laughs at power, experiences the clarity of having perceived it, the sense of belonging that comes from laughing with one's own —and returns home having achieved nothing. Humour as an emotional substitute for politics.

This notion requires nuance, as those who have examined it closely observe that the very metaphor of the “valve” is deceptive: it signifies too many things and permits the measurement of nothing with precision. Yet the core remains valid. Some have demonstrated that laughter, far from being invariably liberating, fulfils a disciplinary function: ridicule keeps people in their place, punishes deviation, and reinforces the norm through the force of shame. Laughter does not merely challenge the order. It also polices it.

In democracies saturated with content, this suspicion possesses a contemporary iteration: a significant portion of the critical humour we consume may function as a ritual of confirmation. It convinces no one; it gathers the already convinced around the pleasure of laughing at the opposing side. It does not initiate conversation. It distributes badges of belonging.

4. Humour as a weapon of intolerance

And then there is the aspect that is most difficult to confront, for it entirely refutes the notion of humour as a natural ally of just causes. Humour is, today, one of the most effective instruments of radicalisation.

Recent research documents this with data. A study of twelve hundred memes from far-right channels demonstrated that those combining extremist narrative with humour achieved greater dissemination than those employing one or the other in isolation: humour is the vehicle that facilitates the transmission of the message. Another analysis, concerning an animated series from an ultra-right party, concluded that humour softens exclusionary discourse —racism, misogyny— and renders it more acceptable to audiences who would reject the unadorned message. Laughter does not embellish exclusion: it introduces it into drawing rooms where it would not otherwise gain entry.

The mechanism possesses an operational name: “it was only a joke”. Irony permits the transmission of the message and, when faced with criticism, a withdrawal —I did not mean it seriously, you do not understand the joke, you take everything too personally. It is a strategic ambiguity that launches the content while reserving the alibi. And the meme is its perfect medium: inexpensive to produce, infinitely replicable, semantically slippery, and capable of circulating far from its original context while carrying a charge that no one claims. Whoever believes that humour resides on the side of virtue has not observed the last few years.

5. So, what does it depend on?

If the same form both opens and closes, the correct question is not whether humour is good or bad, but what determines its sign. And the answer, to the extent that it can be sustained with rigour, is direction.

There is a distinction that circulates in debates regarding comedy —laughing upwards or downwards, against power or against the vulnerable— that should be employed with caution, for it is not a law with universal criteria, but a prudential orientation. It does not resolve every case: at times it is unclear who is above and who is below, and the historical context of inequality carries more weight than the intention of the person making the joke. Yet it points to the essential. Humour that disarms is directed against those who possess power, dogma, or excessive solemnity. Humour that inflicts harm preys upon those already beneath. The form is identical; the direction is not.

This connects with something I maintain in this Notebook regarding other matters: the political nature of a gesture does not reside in the gesture itself, but in its conditions. Just as the political nature of a work does not reside in its subject but in the infrastructure surrounding it, the political nature of a joke does not reside in its being amusing, but in whom it mocks, from where, before whom, and with what circulation. To request “more humour” without qualification is akin to requesting “more political art” without qualification: it remains on the surface of the problem. What matters is the direction and the conditions.

6. What humour can actually do against polarisation

After all of this, I continue to believe that humour has something to offer in times of intolerance. Yet no longer as a weapon that unites magically, but as a concrete and demanding operation.

The discourse of polarisation functions by compelling a choice of side: either you are with my own, or you are the enemy, and any nuance is treachery. Humour can achieve something that serious discourse, in such a climate, almost cannot: the introduction of self-distancing. It allows a community to name its own contradictions without immediately descending into doctrinal language. It sustains both truth and artifice simultaneously, viewing dogma from a distance. In an environment saturated with moral solemnity, a joke that also risks offending one's own side can invite more attentive listening than any manifesto.

And therein lies the key, which is also the condition. Humour that is useful against polarisation is not that which ridicules the opposing side—that merely fuels the trenches; it is part of the ailment. It is that which dares to laugh at one's own. It is that which does not close off interpretation into a slogan, but rather opens it into a question. It is that which pays the price of including itself as a target. Such humour is rare, uncomfortable, and lacks utility, for it does not provide the easy pleasure of superiority. Yet it is the only form that, instead of issuing membership cards, calls them into question.

Perhaps that is why it is prudent to be wary of humour that merely makes us feel more certain, and to seek that which makes us feel, for a moment, slightly less sure of ourselves. That minor insecurity—the insecurity of one who has also laughed at their own side—is among the few things capable of opening a crack in a wall. It is not much. Yet in times that specialise in erecting walls, a crack through which light passes is no small matter.

On open conversation

This text intersects with a question that permeates my work: that the political nature of a form—a work, a critique, a joke—resides not in the form itself, but in its conditions and its direction. Should anyone wish to intervene from the fields of humour studies, the history of satire, political communication, or artistic practice, the notebook remains open.

Sources

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