‘Make America Laugh Again’

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The antidote to MAGA is feminist laughter. “Make America Laugh Again” has become a rallying cry for electing the first Black woman president in U.S. history and an emotional weapon against the furies of Trumpism.

Hours after Joe Biden ended his exhausting 2024 presidential bid, euphoric videos of Kamala Harris laughing exuberantly quickly rekindled the flame of democratic commitment. “She laughs! She’s happy! In Before Times, those were considered good qualities,” declared Baltimore Magazine editor Max Weiss. “I love KaMALA’s laugh,” echoed a chorus of social media commenters, amplifying the vice president’s first name as a portmanteau of “ka!” (the outburst of laughter) and MALA (“Make America Laugh Again”), a satiric acronym and now synonym for the refusal to suffer.

A few other examples from social media:

“The choice is clear. Do you want to be happy or do you want to be miserable?” The people, it seems, would prefer not to be miserable.

Harris’ laughter has become a national symbol of collective healing, affirming the powers of contagious joy to unite community across the bitter divisions of culture and identity. “We need to laugh when we’re bold and burst out in spontaneous pride,” because laughter is a lifeline for resistance against the global onslaught of authoritarian hate and fearmongering.

Like #NastyWomen, “Laffin’ Kamala” originated as a Trump epithet in the vein of “Low Energy Jeb” (Bush), “Wacky Jacky” (Rosen), “Lyin’ Hillary” (Clinton) and “Crazy Nancy” (Pelosi). The alliteration of low-hanging fruit is a preferred tactic for Trump to pile sexist, racist and ableist innuendos on top of ad hominem earworms. But this is one schoolyard taunt the GOP will live to regret. Because the people love laughter! And we are tired of always having to feel so despondent and humorless.

In recent years, political humor has lost its satirical edge. Comedy critics dismiss it as naïve or even irresponsible to pin one’s hopes on the alignment between pleasure and politics. Mockumentary yawns into disaffected parody, sitcoms are flooded by pathos and stand-up comics routinely use the mic to condemn any expectation of escapist or cathartic laughter. Hannah Gadsby, Nathan Fielder, Dave Chappelle and Annie Murphy differently personify the new “humorless” zeitgeist.

KaMALA reasserts laughter as a life-sustaining pleasure. That special power of political satire — to change the rules of reality and unmask grotesque hypocrisy — is now back on the table. No more killjoys, no more self-isolating cynicism, or supercilious pessimism: The people will laugh a new era of democracy into possibility.

There is so much stake in the upcoming election: abortion, climate change, living wages at home and liberation abroad. What good is laughter when Project 2025 plans to dismantle the Department of Education, ban all pornography and radically expand the powers of the presidency? This is not the first time in 21st-century history that laughter has been weaponized against feckless tyranny and authoritarian humorlessness.

Bülent Arınç, the former prime minister of Turkey, tried to prohibit women’s laughter in public in 2014. “She should not laugh loudly in front of all the world,” he failed to dictate. Turkish women responded with a viral social media campaign of euphoric laughter, #kahkaha! Women posted videos of themselves laughing out loud — hysterically, volubly, toothily, convulsively — refusing the patriarchy’s attempt to pathologize female transgression as a symptom of madness or hysteria by transforming it into an opening for transgressive social protest.

Laughter is threatening because it exposes the cracks in repressive regimes, the pressure points where power is contradicted by collective belief. Outrage ensued after 11 women (10 Black and one white) were kicked off a Napa Valley wine train in 2015 for “laughing too loudly,” inciting the viral hashtag “LaughingWhileBlack.”

KaMALA’s laughter builds on the efforts of earlier struggles, such as the outcry that erupted when Code Pink protester Desiree Fairooz was arrested for laughing out loud at Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearings. Fairooz faced up to a year in prison and $2,000 in fines. The criminalization of her laughter became an absurd flash point and morbid symptom of the Trump administration’s attack on democratic dissent.

When women lobbied for the vote in the U.S. in the early 20th century, their political success depended on their broader participation in public life: as laughing spectators, “serpentine dancers,” vaudeville spielers, roller coaster riders, and even séance mediums. Mirroring a hopeful vision of everyday life, the 1907 film “Laughing Gas” features Black comedian Bertha Regustus as an exuberant woman who desegregates white society by spreading her laughter contagiously — to her boss, migrant workers and police officers. Naturally, backlash against such representations was instantaneous. Obituary columnists published hundreds of false eulogies for women who allegedly “died from laughing too hard” in an effort to silence their unruly “cachinnation.”

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them” is a punchline paraphrased by Margaret Atwood in her 1982 lecture on “Writing the Male Character.” The GOP clearly intends to mobilize a slew of racist and sexist tropes that render abject all outbursts of minoritarian joy. We know the script, but this time voters are listening with a different ear.

“Make America Laugh Again” is a plea for generous pleasure over endless misery and suffering. Affect is not isomorphic with social change, but it can pave the way to emboldened resistance. With the repeated failure of national polls or talking head pundits to predict election outcomes, it often feels more consequential to take the temperature of the national mood. What we all witnessed in the immediate hours after Biden ended his campaign was an explosion of feminist laughter! We might even call it “Medusan,” in the spirit of Hélène Cixous, who rallied women to seize on “the occasion to speak” in her provocative 1976 essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa.”

“Laffin’ Kamala” has reverberated into #KaMALA, energizing the Harris campaign to fundraise $81 million within 24 hours. Listening to Harris laugh, how can you resist the impulse to join? Her laughter clearly comes from a place of the desire to speak. It emits a loud, festive, full-throated, raucous and unselfconscious burst of enjoyment. Her laughter gives voice to all the unlaughed laughs of feminist history, which may very well determine the election outcome in November — and beyond. Listen up!

Maggie Hennefeld is professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of “Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema” and co-curator of the four-disc DVD/Blu-ray set “Cinema’s First Nasty Women.”