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Humour
Is Laughter Liberating or Cruel?
Alfie Bown investigates different categories of laughter.
Comedy has become a pressure point for contemporary culture. It flares up in debates about censorship, cancellation, progressivism, and even fascism. An obvious example would be the now infamous Oscars ceremony at which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife – on a stage that’s renowned for its ‘roasting’ humour. This provoked anxiety among those on stage and those off it, leading to arguments about the overstepping of boundaries. Other examples might include recent controversies over Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle, or the fallout over Paul Currie ejecting a guest who refused to applaud the Palestine flag. If once comedy was a shared experience of relief – a departure from norms and cultural pressures – today it seems to be a nexus of social tension. Some say that comedy should champion the social politics of the day, while others argue against what they see as the regulation of comedy by social politics. Commentators, and comedians themselves, are invariably tempted onto one or other side of this war. By taking up sides in this argument, they frame the situation in a particular way. This, I will argue here, precludes the possibility of comedy working against the excesses of contemporary culture, or for the universal fraternal solidarity that marks funny comedy.
A long of history of philosophizing has worked to consider the deep and instinctive power of comedy and laughter, pointing to how critical it is for the healthy life of people and society. Since the time of Aristotle and the Greek and Roman comedies of Aristophanes and Plautus, it has been known that comedy is ideologically deeply powerful, and critical to the maintenance of society, even if people have always been inclined to dismiss it as unserious and apolitical.
For many of the philosophers, if true comedy is defined by anything, it is by its ability to confront us with a deeply philosophical realization: that we’re all lacking, with failure at our core. This is something we all have in common. Perhaps then, with comedy presently becoming a point of tension rather than a point of connection, this universalist spirit of comedy is at risk of becoming a thing of the past. True comedy might be under threat. In this moment, then, we should revisit and contextualize the philosophical history of comedy.
Types of Laughter
Russian revolutionary philosopher Alexander Herzen (1812-70) wrote that it would be interesting to write a history of laughter. The idea is provocative, because in some ways we think of laughter as a universal instinct – a human response unchanged over time. On the other hand, if humour does change over time – as seems incontrovertible – this shows something unsettling: that even our most instinctive and apparently spontaneous reactions are conditioned by social and cultural change.
In the last several decades, those studying comedy have divided theories about it into types, with the most common typing being ‘superiority theory’ and ‘relief theory’. Writers who have taken this approach include Andrew Stott (Comedy, 2005) and Simon Critchley (On Humour, 2001).
Historically, the first name associated with superiority theory is perhaps the most famous theorist of comedy, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes wrote in Leviathan (1651) that “laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly.” The idea is that laughter is the act of a secure individual, in a Hobbesian ‘glory’ of self-celebration. Perhaps following in these footsteps, the French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in the nineteenth century that when we see a man fall over in the street, we issue a sudden and irrepressible laugh that seems to say “Look at me! I am not falling! I am walking upright. I would never be so silly as to fail to see a gap in the pavement, or a cobblestone blocking the way” (The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 1859). Baudelaire’s tone might however indicate a critical departure from Hobbes: Baudelaire emphasizes the ‘I’ of the person laughing – suggesting a subject who, unlike the secure subject of Hobbes, asserts himself anxiously through his laughter, boasting in his celebrated position over the target of the laughter. But Baudelaire’s emphasis makes this claim itself seem comic, ridiculous, hinting that it could just as easily be the laugher who fell over and was laughed at. Thus, we might called Hobbesian laughter ‘secure superiority’, and Baudelairian laughter ‘anxious superiority’. Continuing in the superiority tradition, the undervalued theorist of comedy Jonathan Hall argues that, since it is a group activity, laughter can even be a ‘fascist joy’, involving ‘collaboration with the powerholders’ (Anxious Pleasures, 1995). In other words, this type of laughter of superiority simply affirms one person or group over another.
On the other side of the debate, associated with relief theory, is the idea of laughter as liberation. In his 1905 essay ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’, Sigmund Freud remarks that “civilization and higher education have a large influence in the development of repression” – which in turn means that “primary possibilities of enjoyment… are lost to us.” Freud then explains that in a joke repressions are lifted, and thus the work of civilization and higher education are undone: “we are laughing at the same thing that makes a peasant laugh at a coarse piece of smut.” Broadly in the same tradition, the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that true laughter – which he called ‘carnival’ laughter – “is the laughter of all the people… it is universal in its scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity” (Rabelais and His World, 1984).
On these theories, in contrast to the laughter of superiority, laughter can function as a kind of carnivalesque or joyous confrontation with one’s own inadequacies and failures. It is a laughter often breaking rather than conforming to social norms, and in this we find an equalizing, democratic, universal quality. In this laughter, kings become peasants and left becomes right. One might for instance imagine that this laughter might be associated with ‘inappropriate’ material (Freud uses the term ‘smut’); or on the other hand, with potentially offensive attacks on those in power, such as in caricature (Bakhtin refers to taking down kings and queens). Yet in fact, relief laughter is directed at ‘all and everyone’, including the participants themselves.
Artwork © Simon Ellinas 2025 please visit caricatures.org.uk
One or Two Laughters?
We might provisionally use this ‘type’ theory to read the present comedic moment, to simply say that while we see plenty of superiority laughter, the laughter of carnivalesque relief seems to have receded into the background. But this would be too easy, as another philosophical tradition in the history of laughter stresses the inadequacy of dividing laughter into types.
As theorists of laughter, we are inclined to divide it into types so that we can focus on what we like of comedy while dismissing what we do not. A clear example is found in a small section of Simon Critchley’s On Humour titled ‘Reactionary Humour’. Here he writes that “it is important to recognize that not all humour is [liberating], and most of the best jokes are fairly reactionary, or at best, simply serve to reinforce social consensus.” After this disclaimer-like appraisal of good jokes creating ‘bad laughter’, Critchley focuses his attention on humour which can be seen as more radical and – to his mind – preferable.
The novelist Milan Kundera noticed the problem of humour one doesn’t like, and tried to deal with it differently. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1996), he wrote that “imitation of laughter and (the devil’s) original laughter are both called by the same name.” For Kundera, this is an unfortunate mistake. He continues: “Nowadays we don’t realize that the same external display (that of laughter) serves two absolutely opposed internal attitudes. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other.” Even more forcefully than Critchley, then, Kundera feels such a great divide between a preachy, imitative laughter at jokes which repeat and reiterate social positions, and a truly diabolical and radical ‘devil’s laughter’, that he feels it’s a mistake to label them with the same word, of ‘laughter’. Rather, ideological laughter is laughter that supports existing ideologies (overall ideas and positions, which usually support those in power), whereas diabolical laughter is a dangerous comedy that produces something new. Perhaps – again – we can relate this distinction to the situation today. Are we seeing the ideology-supporting imitation of laughter, rather than the real – diabolical – thing?
Yet the fact that we use the same word to describe these reactions is surely not a mistake. For a comparison, Freud wrote of ‘love’, that it is no coincidence that we use the word for so many different things: sexual or romantic love; relationships with family members; even desire for objects or types of food. Instead, he insists that the reason we use the same word points to a hidden connection between the phenomena. We can apply the same logic to ‘comedy’ and ‘laughter’, too.
For the Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar, laughter has an ideological impact on us by making us feel free and relieved – liberated to give up ourselves to it:
“Laughter is the condition of ideology. It provides us with the distance, the very space in which ideology can take its full swing. It is only with laughter that we become ideological subjects… It is only when we laugh and breathe freely that ideology truly has a hold on us.”
(‘Strel sredi koncerta’, 1986).
By this logic, we can’t really separate relief theory from superiority theory, since it is in laughter’s very appearance of spontaneity and relief that we are laid open to being subjected to ideological influences, and thus to feeling superior to those who don’t share that worldview.
Once we arrive at this conclusion, it seems present even in the arguments of Hobbes and Baudelaire, for whom the subject can only really feel superior to the target of the laughter by believing in the ideology of the laughter itself, as it were. Indeed, it is when we experience laughter as if it represents freedom and truth that we are most in the grip of a worldview. This shows the powerful fantasy of a joke: it can catch us in its grip and make us the subjects of a particular worldview. But it can also make us confront the production of ideology as the deceptive illusion it often is.
Perhaps then, contra Critchley, there are no good and bad jokes (when they are actually funny), because all jokes – even when they seem to be a burst of self-celebratory glory – contain a signal of the core of our subjectivity: failure, lack, disaster, and contradiction. In this sense, attempts to divide jokes into ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ miss the point. Jokes might attempt to support or to attack contemporary political or social positions; but whatever the joke is, it is always attempting to be universal, either in its contradictory status that goes against the grain of the conscious position of the joker, or in its consciously universalist approach.
Laughter Now
Perhaps it is only when it isn’t funny that comedy can be truly didactic, affirmative and ideological. A comedy that confirms what we already believe is reflective of the particularly divisive ideology of contemporary online discourse, defined by bubbles of self-confirming identitarianism. Such jokes are designed to be perfectly fit for sharing on social media platforms among communities on which they rely for their success. They are circulated in curated feeds to target audiences made up those who ‘agree’ with them. The laughter that follows them displays a kind of Dunning-Kruger effect: self-assessment takes place in which objectivity is eschewed and the superiority of the listener is simply confirmed. Perhaps this is the ‘imitative’ laughter that Kundera had in mind. It has nothing to do with funny, true laughter and comedy.
We began with the idea that the tension around comedy is greater than ever. Perhaps this is simply because comedy is universalist, and our culture is particularist and divisive.
Laughter, as we can learn from the history of its philosophy, is a powerful ideological tool, which can construct, entrench, and solidify identities, ideologies and truths, playing a deceptive trick that makes it appear as though we’re living in a world that makes sense and has structure and order. But it is also the anxious signal of the universal failed subjectivity from which we all originate, and on top of which all worldviews must be built. Our society can apparently handle only the first of comedy’s functions – its ideological reinforcement – but not the second – its universalizing instinct.
© Alfie Bown 2025
Alfie Bown is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He is the author of In the Event of Laughter (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Post-Comedy, a new book on comedy and politics, out now with Polity Press.