Comedy: serious business

The essential function of the comedic act remains the same: to produce laughter through the “mental jolt of a sudden leap from one plane or associative context to another.” What is changing is not the nature of laughter but the range of its accepted targets. “As laughter emerged from antiquity, it was so aggressive that it has been likened to a dagger,” Koestler notes. Traditionally, comedians used the dagger of wit to stick the powerful, exposing hypocrisy and abuses that threatened the public good. Now, abetted by the abundance of online platforms, other actors have seized that dagger to attack the weak, not the strong. Meanwhile, the powerful, online and off, demand a coercive loyalty that sees laughter as sedition, and seek to disarm and suppress would-be comedic assailants.

At this contentious national—and global—moment, when authoritarianism is on the rise around the world, it’s important to keep humor above ground. Comedians who twit presidents or kings are in the firing line because they are on the front line. They are the advance guard of the war against those who treat human beings like cartoons. If we don’t defend them, the joke will be on us.

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