Pranksters vs. Autocrats

For no specific reason, I had occasion to revisit recently a piece I wrote for the New Statesman in 2021, about the political efficacy of humour, “Can Comedy Change the World?” Acknowledging an affinity between comedy and critique—for the anthropologist Mary Douglas, “[a] joke is a play upon form [that] affords opportunity for realising that an accepted pattern has no necessity”—I was less optimistic than some:

“Under the tyrannies of Hitler in Germany and of Stalin in the Soviet Union, humour was driven underground,” Arthur Koestler wrote in the 1970s. “Dictators fear laughter more than bombs.”

It’s an inspiring thought—that comedy is consequential, a clear and present danger to the despot. Alas, there’s not much evidence that it’s true. Do autocrats fear laughter? Or do they simply dislike being laughed at and have the power to put a stop to it?

The rest of the essay asked what comedy can do, if not strike fear in the autocrat’s heart. My answer was “not nothing”: “The social value of …