Laughter in the Dark

Writers, singers, and everyday people skewering dictators or whole regimes is a mainstay of political history, from the Soviet Union to Syria, and in our lives today. “I’d-like-to-report-a-murder” moments go way back before Charlie Chaplin played “Adenoid Hynkel” in The Great Dictator to Rome’s Emperor Claudius being satirized as a pumpkin two millennia ago.

Today, the online #Resistance has adopted its hashtag as the inheritors of similarly pugnacious movements that defied authoritarians. Yet online dunking tends toward simple insults, often involving the color orange and body horror imagery.

Thinking of the many stories I encountered in my research about the ways everyday people fought concentration-camp regimes, I want to talk about how humor-as-resistance actually works in oppressive states and what might be accomplished in the U.S. today and going forward.

Fair warning: this post considers how comedy operates strategically, and nothing is less funny than surgery on a joke. If you’re goofing around to blow off steam and aren’t interested in wielding it for any ends beyond that, I’m not trying to police your jokes with friends. But the question of whether or not cool burns accomplish anything has weighed on my mind in the face of the daily inanities of the Trump transition. So I want to go through some of what I found on what actually happens with political humor in the face of adversarial power or tyrants—real and wannabe.

The classic view

George Orwell linked comedy with social change at the smallest level: “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

This destabilization of the status quo is surely why autocrats have no sense of humor, and why comedians like Mel Brooks are advocates of comedy in defiance of murderous leaders. Citing Chaplin’s take on Hitler as his inspiration in a 2012 Q&A with Salon, Brooks explained why he pits humor against brutality.

“The only weapon I’ve really got is comedy. And if I can make this guy ludicrous, if I can make you laugh at him, then it’s a victory of sorts. You can’t get on a soapbox with these orators,” said Brooks, “because they’re very good at convincing the masses that they’re right. But if you can make them look ridiculous, you can win over the people.”

Today it’s complicated

Entertainment and politics have always been deeply bound together, but the relationship has become more incestuous since Orwell was alive and Brooks launched his career. Celebrities have moved from commenters to practitioners. Across my lifetime, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura and Hulk Hogan all became political figures, wielding humor as part of the characters they developed.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a comic, played a president on television then became a president. Donald Trump the politician won on the basis of an imaginary persona invented by others. Silvio Berlusconi dominated Italian media as an owner before taking control of Italy itself as prime minister. Vladimir Putin staged buffoonish portraits of himself shirtless on horseback or camping, like an aging film star chasing one last bid at a Rocky sequel.

If everything becomes a show, nothing is real. Entertainment has eaten politics, and humor is just a branch of entertainment. Which is not to say that humor doesn’t still have a role in opposing oppression. And overwhelmingly, the authoritarian, and the right in general, are terrible at using humor as an art. But power has gotten more proficient at stealing and suffocating its opponents’ humorous resistance.

Humor in creating solidarity

In Serbia during the late 1990s, a pro-democracy group called Otpor!—which translates as Resistance!—put a poster of President Slobodan Milosevic’s face on an oil barrel and left a large stick near it in a shopping district. The fun that shoppers had while waiting in line eventually brought police, who were more or less forced to arrest the barrel. A group that started with only 20 members grew to a movement of 70,000 people, tremendously expanding what they could accomplish.

The group embraced the idea of what would come to be called Laughtivism, using humor as part of a larger nonviolent strategy to break the hold of political repression.

Physical action used to humorous ends can be very effective. In 1983 after a strike in Chile where miners were surrounded by police, and it was clear that the government was prepared to unleash bloodshed, the strikers called for a different kind of demonstration, in which people walked or drove half-speed on a predetermined day—a form of protest by which people would join in solidarity and realize their strength with little or no risk of arrest.

In Italy decades later, two satirists wound up blackballed from state programming, leading Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo to condemn censorship. Fo and his wife Franca Rame put together a vicious but hilarious performance in 2003 that mocked Italy’s Berlusconi, telling a tale of the Prime Minister ending up with part of Putin’s brain after the latter’s assassination by terrorists.

Humor allows the less powerful to level the playing field. In an interview with The Guardian, Otpor founder Srdja Popovic said about Syria that “Fighting Assad is like boxing Mike Tyson. You don’t want to box Mike Tyson. You want to challenge him at chess.”

The limits of humor

What does this translate to for Americans? It’s not enough to make Trump ridiculous. He makes himself outlandish daily and thrives on both outrage and attention.

The thrill of the spectacle and defying common decency are key parts of his political identity, and Trump grows on hate from the left when it binds his followers closer to him. Even Berlusconi was eventually tarnished by the stories of Bunga Bunga parties and an underage girl, but his political career only ended with his death in 2023.

For humor to be an effective weapon against Trump, he has to be wounded in ways that unsettle him or tarnish his impunity and defiance of the law in the eyes of his followers—who admire him for his willingness to embrace corruption and trash norms. The harm his policies do has to be made apparent in comic ways that might resonate with even the apolitical. It’s a challenge.

Even when political humor is effective in extreme authoritarian societies, it often carries great costs in the form of reprisals against the artists. Dario Fo and Franca Rame suffered various punishments during their decades of defiance of Italian politicians. Fo was arrested by police in November 1973. Earlier the same year, Rame was kidnapped and raped by fascists.

More recently, Sonja Noderer wrote about the use of humor by the resistance to President Bashar al-Assad’s abuses in Syria, saying, “The daring works of cartoonist Ferzat, the powerful songs of Qashoush and the witty slogans of protestors in Kafranbel are only some examples. The response to these humorous stunts has been telling: Ferzat’s hands were broken and Qashoush’s vocal chords severed under torture by regime forces, while the Kafranbel cartoonists were assassinated by Islamists.”

Assessing the danger

While threats have been made against journalists, immigrants, and protesters—as well as implicit threats against trans people (reinforced by the existing high rates of violence against that community)—the U.S. has not yet crossed the threshold of official violent reprisals or physical revenge against those who mock the president (though we’ve come close). Trump did recently call for critics of the Supreme Court to be jailed, though he and his allies seem more likely to use political pressure to get his opponents blackballed or fired rather than being able to resort to arrest or torture.

Given the lower level of risk compared to those who have paid a severe price for their defiance of strongmen and dictators, the melodrama of online anti-Trump Resistance types can trigger eyerolls. Valorizing the bravery of anti-Trump stances in the cases where a person is unlikely to be punished for them might be embarrassing, but preserving the long tradition of openly mocking political leaders is vital.

And even in the U.S., humor carries some risk. Served up dishonest drivel in a press release by Ron DeSantis’s team, Axios Tampa Bay reporter Ben Montgomery responded, “This is propaganda, not a press release.” Montgomery soon lost his job. We can expect more of this and worse under Trump 2.0.

But sometimes comedians get their revenge. Juli Briskman, the woman who was biking when she flipped off Trump’s motorcade in 2017, was forced to resign after she posted the images on social media. But she ran for a spot on the Loudon County Board of Supervisors in Virginia and won in 2019. She won again in 2023. She didn’t run on having flipped the president off, but mentioned enjoying the fact that one of Trump’s golf courses is in her district.

The Onion similarly struck a blow against Trump ally Alex Jones by buying Infowars’ assets at a forced bankruptcy auction. It’s a great joke all by itself, but it also carries the seeds of social change inside it: the Onion was ending Infowars’ stream of hate that targeted families victimized by gun violence—in a deal that included the backing of those families. If the company manages to defeat a court challenge, they can use satire to further mock and deconstruct the conspiracy narrative that hoodwinked so many and made Jones rich.

When is comedy most effective?

Just as sports can be a less harmful pantomime of war, humor creates a battlefield that is, for now in the U.S., typically bloodless. Humor that’s legible to a broad part of the population can create a rift between authoritarian leaders and their followers.

A comic response to authoritarianism can likewise reduce anxiety or dread among vulnerable groups, at least momentarily by cutting the target down to size or making the autocrat mundane. Doing so, it denies the leader what he most longs for: to be feared.

The promise to a lot of people who would like to just ride things out is that they won’t face any harm or repercussions if they let Trump and his allies do what they want. Humor can keep the fundamental ridiculousness of repressive society front and center to people who might be inclined to disengage.

“When the nonviolent resisters use humor…” writes sociologist Majken Jul Sørensen, “Not only is it hard to justify violence. Almost all kinds of reactions, violent or not, make the oppressor look ridiculous.”

Humor American style

I’ve included a lot of international examples here, but the U.S. has its own long and vibrant history of humor in nonviolent civil rights and workers’ rights campaigns. Think of Frederick Douglass, decades before the abolition of slavery, delivering rousing mimicry in his talk on “The Southern Style of Preaching to Slaves.”

“See how mercifully He has adapted you to the duties you are to fulfill,” Douglass said, “while to your masters, who have slender frames and long delicate fingers, He has given brilliant intellects, that they may do the thinking, while you do the working.”

Bruce Hartford wrote about using non-violence and humor in 1964 while trying to force Bank of America to abandon discriminatory hiring policies. Hartford and his CORE colleagues in California had learned that preprinted checks were a formality—they could write the same information on anything and use it as a check. They opened checking accounts with small balances and drew improvised checks on their picket signs denouncing Bank of America for its racist practices.

“When we entered with our signs on their long sticks the managers rushed up,” Hartford wrote. ”[They said] ‘You can't picket in here! This is private property!’ ‘Oh, we're not picketing,’ we responded with good cheer, ‘we're here to cash a check. See, it's written out right there.’ Again, many were shocked, but even a few of the managers had to laugh.”

Divisive humor

In the wake of the November 5 election, a common phrase appeared on social media, said by people on the right and the left, Harris backers and Trump supporters alike: “Enjoy the camps!”

The right might have been crowing and kidding on the square, imagining leftist enemies locked up by Trump. The left was more likely to direct the comment at those who didn’t show up to vote because they felt Harris hadn’t done enough to gain their support.

This bleak category of humor doesn’t have much use in resisting authoritarian trends. In some cases, it’s a method of coping with fear and disappointment, but ultimately it tends to lead to more division and isolation.

Another real danger is defeatism. It’s one thing for gallows humor to be common among those whose friends and associates were actually being executed. It’s another to keep saying in America in 2024, “We’re all going to die!”

Constantly resorting to gallows humor to joke about a worst possible future that might still be prevented by taking action is a way to disempower the people who are willing to act and could make a difference.

All your great irony-poisoned jokes

It’s impossible to resist savage humor when Trump himself stares directly into the sun during an eclipse, and creates a circle of courtiers that resemble a circus: Dr. Oz, whose peers have called him a grifter, might soon be in charge of the nation’s most vulnerable patients. RFK Jr. could soon deny children vaccines as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

And most kinds of humor invite do actually invite people to engage. But comedy can also exclude through use of stereotypes and prejudice. The recent creation of Elonia, a femme version of Elon Musk as First Lady, is an example of a joke that aims to be subversive but just winds up reinforcing the misogyny that Musk himself has espoused.

Even in the absence of bigotry, humor that’s not new or challenging, that spirals around the same topics in ways that have been endlessly revisited, can become demotivating. It’s important to bring new energy to the mockery if you want to make a difference. As Rudolph Herzog (son of that other Herzog) wrote in his book Dead Funny, “Comedy in a democracy also risks being mistaken for real resistance.”

Comedy can’t change anything in and of itself—what follows on its heels is what’s important: a shift in the views of the larger society, a commitment to change, or taking advantage of the windows opened by a broader awareness of an issue and the connections it makes.

I’m 100% as irony-poisoned as the next Trump hater. But if we can’t imagine uniting more people than currently agree with us through humor and the recognition of shared experiences, then deep down, I wonder whether we have any faith in democracy. If we make the same jokes over and over to the same crowd, and that’s all we’re doing, but we tell ourselves we’re accomplishing something, most of the time, I’m guessing we’re probably not.

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