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 require more humour. In the face of dogma, entrenched positions, and angry solemnity, laughter might restore a measure of air, perspective, and shared humanity. I share this impulse. Yet, I have learned to distrust it, for it conceals a false premise: that humour resides on the side of virtue. It does not. Humour possesses no singular character, and to believe otherwise is the primary error in any defence of humour during difficult times.
I wish to propose something more uncomfortable and useful: that humour is ambivalent by structure, not by accident. The same form—irony, caricature, the meme—serves to open a line of inquiry or to close ranks, to disarm the powerful or to humiliate the vulnerable. What determines its effect is not the fact that it is humour. It is something else, and knowing what that is matters.
1. Laughter is born divided
Basta mirar las teorías clásicas del humor para ver que la ambivalencia está en su raíz. Hobbes describió la risa como una «súbita gloria»: el placer de sentirse superior ante la debilidad, el defecto o el ridículo de otro. Esa teoría explica la caricatura que degrada al tirano deformándole el cuerpo y también el chiste que deshumaniza a una minoría. La risa de superioridad sirve para bajar al que está arriba y pisar al que está abajo. Es el mismo mecanismo; cambia el blanco.
Freud provided another facet: humour as a discharge, a psychic economy that allows for the oblique expression of what cannot be stated directly. This renders it a precious instrument for processing fear and circumventing censorship. Yet, this same discharge fuels the contrary suspicion—that laughing relieves tension without transforming anything, that one vents and remains unchanged. The incongruity theory of Kant and Schopenhauer, the laughter that erupts when an expectation is suddenly undone, explains Dadaist montage and the absurd, yet it takes no side. It is a mechanic of surprise, not a moral compass.
Not even the carnival is unequivocally liberating. The festival of inverted order, which Bakhtin elevated as an emblem of popular comic culture, may be tolerated by those in power precisely because it is a regulated exception that, upon its conclusion, confirms the return of the status quo. One is permitted to laugh for a day so that one may better obey for the remainder of the year. Transgression does not always subvert; sometimes, it merely provides ventilation.
2. What the history of comic art teaches, and what it does not
La sátira visual tiene una genealogía gloriosa. Hay que mirarla sin idealizarla. Goya, en Los Caprichos, atacó la superstición y la maquinaria inquisitorial con una libertad que todavía impresiona. Daumier representó al rey Luis Felipe como un Gargantúa grotesco que engullía riqueza y pagó con la cárcel. George Grosz desolló con su lápiz el militarismo y la corrupción de la República de Weimar, y acabó en la exposición nazi de «arte degenerado», despojado de su nacionalidad.
These cases demonstrate something significant: power perceives satire as a genuine threat, sufficient to warrant imprisonment, seizure, and proscription. They also demonstrate the opposite of what we might wish. The satire of Grosz did not halt Nazism. That of Daumier did not topple the July Monarchy. Its diagnostic power—its capacity to name what was occurring—was immense; its capacity to arrest it, slight or non-existent. And when one seeks firm evidence that critical humour has 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
This is the objection that any honest defence of humour must sustain before addressing it. Critical humour appears to challenge the status quo, yet in reality it discharges the tension that might otherwise have translated into action, thereby assisting in the toleration of the intolerable. One laughs at power, experiences the lucidity of having perceived it, the sense of belonging that comes from laughing with one's peers—and returns home having achieved nothing. Humour as an emotional substitute for politics.
La idea hay que matizarla, porque quienes la han examinado de cerca advierten que la propia metáfora de la «válvula» es tramposa: significa demasiadas cosas y no permite medir nada con precisión. Pero el núcleo aguanta. Hay quien ha mostrado que la risa, lejos de ser siempre liberadora, cumple una función disciplinaria: el ridículo mantiene a la gente en su sitio, castiga la desviación, refuerza la norma a fuerza de vergüenza. La risa no solo desafía el orden. También lo vigila.
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
Then there is the aspect that is most difficult to confront, as it entirely refutes the notion of humour as a natural ally of just causes. Humour is currently 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.
El mecanismo tiene un nombre operativo: «solo era una broma». La ironía permite emitir el mensaje y, ante la crítica, retirarse —no lo decía en serio, no entiendes el chiste, te lo tomas todo a pecho—. Es una ambigüedad estratégica que lanza el contenido y se reserva la coartada. Y el meme es su soporte perfecto: barato de producir, infinitamente replicable, semánticamente resbaladizo, capaz de circular lejos de su contexto original llevando dentro una carga que ya nadie firma. Quien crea que el humor está del lado bueno no ha mirado los últimos años.
5. So, what does it depend on?
If the same form both opens and closes, the pertinent question is not whether humour is inherently good or bad, but rather what determines its character. The answer, to the extent that it can be rigorously maintained, is its 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.
Esto enlaza con algo que sostengo en este Cuaderno a propósito de otras cosas: lo político de un gesto no está en el gesto, sino en sus condiciones. Como lo político de una obra no está en su tema sino en la infraestructura que la rodea, lo político de un chiste no está en que sea gracioso, sino en contra quién se ríe, desde dónde, ante quién y con qué circulación. Pedir «más humor» sin más es como pedir «más arte político» sin más: se queda en la superficie del problema. Lo que importa es la dirección y las condiciones.
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.
Therein lies the key. Humour that is useful against tension is not that which ridicules the opposing side—that merely fuels the trenches and is part of the affliction. It is that which dares to laugh at one's own side. It is that which does not close interpretation into a slogan, but opens it into a doubt. It is that which pays the price of including itself as a target. Such humour is rare, uncomfortable, and lacks profitability, as it does not provide the easy pleasure of superiority. Yet it is the only form that, rather than distributing credentials of belonging, calls them into question.
Perhaps for this reason, it is prudent to be wary of humour that merely reinforces our sense of being correct, and to seek that which makes us feel, for a moment, slightly less certain of ourselves. That minor insecurity—the experience of having laughed at one's own side—is among the few things capable of opening a fissure in a wall. It is not substantial. Yet in times that specialise in the construction of walls, a fissure through which light may pass is not a trivial matter.
About the 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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