The laughter that tells the truth

There are truths that cannot be said in earnest — but can be told with a laugh. For this, satire has in every age been both loved and persecuted. A jester could say to a king’s face what would have cost a minister his head — because he said it in jest. Laughter is the oldest and most unarmed way to tell the powerful: “the king has no clothes.”

Why power fears a joke

Anger, power knows how to suppress: it can be declared a revolt, banned, punished. But laughter is elusive. People stop trembling before the one they have mocked, and fear is the chief instrument of any unjust power. That is why tyrants have borne plots more calmly than caricatures: a bullet kills a man, but ridicule kills his grandeur. A joke does not topple a throne, but it strips off its gilding — and suddenly everyone sees plain wood.

The line between laughter and cruelty

Satire has its honor: it strikes upward — at the strong, not the weak. To laugh at one who is already humiliated is not satire but bullying; it is the same fist, merely in a glove of jokes. A true satirist is always on the side of the small person against the great, the victim against the executioner. Herein lies his conscience: he laughs not to finish someone off, but to give the frightened back the feeling that laughing at the powerful is allowed.

“Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
— George Orwell

My opinion: treat those who can laugh at power more carefully than they may first appear. A society where one can still joke about the strong is healthy; a society that punishes a joke is already sick, it just does not yet admit the diagnosis. Laughter is a thermometer of freedom. And as long as a people laughs at its fears rather than falling silent before them, it is still alive and still free.

Cover: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Netherlandish Proverbs” (1559).