This essay challenges the prevailing view among critical theorists that laughter’s emancipatory power stems from its ability to speak the truth. The disparate accounts of laughter offered by Plato, Hobbes, and Nietzsche exemplify an alternative strategy for theorizing laughter as a performance of deception, or an experience that mystifies rather than enlightens. While a view of laughter as deceptive may at first appear to reduce laughter’s critical leverage over ideology, I argue that this approach offers a stronger account of its emancipatory power. Speaking the truth does little more than reveal the falsity of ideology, and laughter’s capacity to actually transform society hinges on how it deceives differently – namely, in such a way that prompts the imagination and construction of more democratic institutions and modes of relating. The essay concludes by considering the implications of this argument for how we understand the role of truth in critical theory today.
ArendtHannah. 1972. “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers.” In Crises of the Republic, edited by ArendtHannah, 3–47. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.
2.
ArendtHannah. 1996. “Truth and Politics.” In Between Past and Future, edited by ArendtHannah, 223–59. New York: Penguin Books.
3.
Aristophanes. 2017. Frogs and Other Plays. Translated by HalliwellStephen. New York: Oxford University Press.
4.
BakhtinMikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by IswolskyHelene. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
5.
BeardMary. 2014. Laughter in Ancient Rome. Oakland: University of California Press.
6.
BerlantLaurenNgaiSianne. 2017. “Comedy Has Issues.” Critical Inquiry43, no. 2: 233–49.
7.
BownAlfie. 2019. In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy. New York: Bloomsbury.
8.
BrayMark. 2013. Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street. Alresford, UK: Zero Books.
9.
BryantGregory A.AktipisC. Athena. 2014. “The Animal Nature of Spontaneous Human Laughter.” Evolution and Human Behavior35: 327–35.
10.
ButlerJudith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
11.
ClarkeMaudemarie. 1990. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
12.
ConnollyWilliam E.2017. Aspirational Fascism: Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
13.
ConwayDaniel W.SeeryJohn. 1992. The Politics of Irony: Essays in Self-Betrayal. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
14.
CooperDavina. 2020. “Towards an Adventurous Institutional Politics: The Prefigurative ‘As if’ and the Reposing of What’s Real.” The Sociological Review68, no. 5: 893–916.
15.
CritchleySimon. 2002. On Humour. London: Routledge.
16.
DavisJessica Milner, ed. 2017. Satire and Politics: The Interplay of Heritage and Practice. Sydney: Palgrave Macmillan.
17.
Davila-RossMarinaAllcockBethanThomasChrisBardKim A.. 2011. “Aping Expressions? Chimpanzees Produce Distinct Laugh Types When Responding to Laughter of Others.” Emotion11, no. 5: 1013–1020.
18.
DeleuzeGilles. 2002. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by TomlinsonHugh. London: Continuum.
19.
DerridaJacques. 1979. Spurs/Éperons. Translated by HarlowBarbara. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
20.
DietzMary. 1986. “Trapping the Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception.” The American Political Science Review80, no. 3: 777–99.
21.
EagletonTerry. 2019. Humour. New Haven: Yale University Press.
ErasmusDesiderius. 2015. The Praise of Folly. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
24.
EubenJ. Peter. 2003. Platonic Noise. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
25.
FletcherAngus. 2016. Comic Democracies: From Ancient Athens to the American Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
26.
FreudSigmund. 2003. The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by CrickJoyce. New York: Penguin Books.
27.
GervaisMatthewWilsonDavid S.. 2005. “The Evolution and Function of Laughter and Humor: A Synthetic Approach.” The Quarterly Review of Biology80, no. 4: 395–430.
28.
GeussRaymond. 1999. The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. New York: Cambridge University Press.
29.
GiamarioPatrick. 2016. “The Laughing Body Politic: The Counter-sovereign Politics of Hobbes’s Theory of Laughter.” Political Research Quarterly69, no. 2: 309–19.
GiamarioPatrick. 2018. “The Politics of Laughter: Theorizing Laughter Critically in the Social Order.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University.
32.
GiamarioPatrick. 2022. Laughter as Politics: Critical Theory in an Age of Hilarity. Forthcoming. Edinburgh University Press.
33.
GraeberDavid. 2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
34.
GrantRuth. 1997. Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
35.
HalliwellStephen. 2008. Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
36.
HeskJon. 2000. Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
37.
HobbesThomas. 1991. Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive). Edited by GertBernard. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
38.
HobbesThomas. 1994. “The Answer to Sir William Davenant’s Preface before Gondibert.” In The Collected Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by MolesworthSir William, vol. IV, 441–58. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press.
39.
HobbesThomas. 2008. The Elements of Law Natural and Politic. New York: Oxford University Press.
40.
HobbesThomas. 2012. Leviathan. Edited by Noel Malcolm. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
41.
HolmNicholas. 2017. Humour as Politics: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary Comedy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
42.
HorkheimerMaxAdornoTheodor W.2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by JephcottEdmund. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
43.
JayMartin. 2010. The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
44.
JenningsKen. 2018. Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture. New York: Scribner.
45.
KantImmanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by GuyerPaulMatthewsEric. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
46.
LatourBruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry30: 225–48.
47.
LombardiniJohn. 2018. The Politics of Socratic Humor. Oakland: University of California Press.
48.
MaeckelberghMarianne. 2016. “The Prefigurative Turn: The Time and Place of Social Movement Practice.” In Social Sciences for an Other Politics, edited by DinersteinAna C., 121–34. London: Palgrave.
49.
McGowanTodd. 2017. Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
50.
NaasMichael. 2016. “Plato and the Spectacle of Laughter.” Angelaki21, no. 3: 13–26.
51.
NehamasAlexander. 1985. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
52.
NietzscheFriedrich. 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by KaufmannWalter. New York: Vintage Books.
53.
NietzscheFriedrich. 1982. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In The Portable Nietzsche, edited by KaufmannWalter, 103–439. New York: Penguin Books.
54.
NietzscheFriedrich. 1989a. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by KaufmannWalter. New York: Vintage Books.
55.
NietzscheFriedrich. 1989b. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by KaufmannWalter. New York: Vintage Books.
56.
NietzscheFriedrich. 1996. Human, All Too Human. Translated by HollingdaleR.J.. New York: Cambridge University Press.
57.
NietzscheFriedrich. 2008. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by LargeDuncan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
58.
NietzscheFriedrich. 2010. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” In The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by GeussRaymondSpeirsRonald, 139–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
59.
ParvulescuAnca. 2010. Laughter: Notes on a Passion. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
60.
ParvulescuAnca. 2017. “Even Laughter? From Laughter in the Magic Theater to the Laughter Assembly Line.” Critical Inquiry43, no. 2: 506–27.
61.
Plato. 1926. Laws. Translated by BuryR.G.. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
62.
Plato. 1986. Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII. Translated by HamiltonWalter. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.
63.
Plato. 1987. Gorgias. Translated by ZeylDonald. Indianapolis: Hackett.
64.
Plato. 1991. The Republic of Plato. Translated by BloomAllan. New York: Basic Books.
65.
Plato. 1993a. Euthydemus. Translated by SpragueRosamond. Indianapolis: Hackett.
66.
Plato. 1993b. Philebus. Translated by FredeDorothea. Indianapolis: Hackett.
67.
Plato. 2003. The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo. Translated by TredennickHughTarrantHarold. London: Penguin.
68.
Plato. 2005. Laches, in Plato: Early Socratic Dialogues, 67–115. Translated by LaneIain. London: Penguin.
69.
Plato. 2008. Symposium. Translated by WaterfieldRobin. New York: Oxford University Press.
70.
Plato. 2009. Protagoras. Translated by TaylorC.C.W.. New York: Oxford University Press.
71.
ProvineRobert R.2000. Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. New York: Viking.
72.
RancièreJacques. 2009. “The Misadventures of Critical Thought.” In The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by ElliottGregory, 25–49. London: Verso.
73.
SandersBarry. 1995. Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History. Boston: Beacon Press.
74.
SitrinMarinaAzzelliniDario. 2014. They Can’t Represent Us!: Reinventing Democracy From Greece To Occupy. London: Verso.
75.
SkinnerQuentin. 2016. “Hobbes and the Social Control of Unsociability.” In The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, edited by MartinichAlHoekstraKinch, 432–50. New York: Oxford University Press.
76.
SmuckerJonathan M.2014. “Can Prefigurative Politics Replace Political Strategy?” Berkeley Journal of Sociology58: 74–82.
77.
SwainDan. 2019. “Not Not but Not yet: Present and Future in Prefigurative Politics.” Political Studies67, no. 1: 47–62.
