Laughter

Authoritarianism is vast darkness.

In the dark, laughter blazes brightly,

lighting a zone of freedom in the gloom.

Authoritarians know this. It frightens them,

So they try to frighten everyone else first.

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In times of repression, play isn’t a luxury—it’s a weapon. Laughter, delight, and mischief can loosen fear’s grip and turn joy into an act of defiance.

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In a fascist state, street clowns can be arrested—not because they are dangerous, but because they remind people how to laugh.

The charge sheet will not say “possession of joy with intent to distribute,” but that’s the real offense. The jokes, the games, the songs remind people they are still capable of delight. And in a system built on fear, that is intolerable.

We think of play as decorative, a luxury for the young or the idle. Under repression, it becomes something else entirely: a method of reclaiming agency. Play shatters the script of obedience. In Prague, during the last years of Soviet rule, young people roamed in spontaneous “laughter brigades”—groups that gathered in public squares to tell absurd stories and then disperse before police arrived. In Argentina’s Dirty War, street performers used slapstick and nonsense to remind bystanders that the regime had not yet extinguished the last scintillas of freedom.

Children play instinctively. A child, even under orders to sit still, will find a way to turn the chair into a fortress or a ship. That is inner freedom: the ability to choose the frame through which you see the moment. Authoritarianism depends on narrowing those frames to only two—submission or punishment. Play offers a third.

Joy has politics. It is not neutral. A smile exchanged in a breadline, a song hummed under one’s breath, a puppet show staged in the shadow of armed guards—such things widen a community’s emotional bandwidth. And the wider it gets, the harder it is to collapse back into the single frequency of fear. Joy is a contagion with its own kind of herd immunity: once enough people have been reminded of it, they resist returning to numbness.

Authoritarians know this, which is why they fear delight. Delight is unruly. It disobeys the timetable of the state. It makes people linger in conversation instead of rushing home under curfew. It invites the imagination to wander past the fences. You can outlaw slogans; it is harder to outlaw laughter.

Creating zones of playful resistance is intentional. In some countries, activists wear clown costumes to political rallies, turning the police response into slapstick for onlookers. Others write satirical songs whose coded verses pass from ear to ear, safe from official censors. Even private games—storytelling circles in kitchens, nonsense poems shared at night—can be acts of defiance. Once people inhabit that space of unruly joy, they are harder to re-enslave.

Perhaps that’s why fascist regimes drag away street clowns. They understand that delight loosens fear’s grip in a way slogans never will. Joy is not just the opposite of despair; it is a refusal to grant despair the final word.

So play. Don’t do it as escape; do it as rebellion. Smuggle delight past the checkpoints. Let it ripple outward. Every crack of laughter in the shadow of cruelty is a crack in the wall—and enough cracks can bring it down.