Throughout Western history, myth creators, playwrights, and actors have understood the value of a real laugh and the danger of a fake one. When it comes to Kamala’s cackle and Tim’s manic laugh, we aren’t looking at joy; we’re looking at dangerous desperation.
Physiologically, there are two kinds of laughter: voluntary and spontaneous. Most of us can laugh spontaneously, which involves a kind of letting go. We let the laugh take over, and other people can see we are really laughing, not faking it. This is important because spontaneous laughter is how we can tell whether our laughing friend is actually a friend or not.
Image by Andrea Widburg using AI.
Voluntary laughter is different. I can’t do it because I feel and sound phony when I try. Even trained actors have trouble sounding genuine when they laugh.
Kamala Harris can sound like an African-American woman laughing spontaneously, which is attractive and funny. But cunning Kamala laughs on cue when she says something that isn’t funny. It’s part of her act, the one she does repeatedly with the same words and the same cackle.
Now, Kamala has picked a Veep candidate with the same act of canned laughter that is supposed to be spontaneous and genuine.
Given these two laughing candidates, the US propaganda machine is talking about joy and laughter to assure us that Kamala’s canned laughter and Tim’s manic laugh are both real. They are not “weird,” a word that the propaganda media just discovered on cue—so that suddenly, the political world is convulsed with manic laughter. Oh, aren’t we funny!
Western culture is awash in evil characters who laugh convulsively at the height of their wrongdoing, whether Batman’s Joker or the Norse trickster god Loki, who sadistically torments the other Nordic gods. This is a piece of historical fiction that has roots in real human behavior.
The world of the theater is symbolized by two clown faces—one laughing and one sad—because professional actors can play both comedy and tragedy, and they do it on cue. Drugs and Method Acting, sometimes together, can achieve this endless laughter.
In fact, there’s not a lot of real laughter driving real Democrats. They are desperate, more desperate than I’ve ever seen them.
But their two national nominees, Kamala and Tim, are the jolliest folks in the world. “Happy Days Are Here Again,” as FDR had it during the Great Depression when everybody needed a laugh.
Desperate people don’t laugh a lot, and certainly not spontaneously. But this pair of clowns are giggling and laughing up a storm, on cue, and they do it over and over.
My gut thinks this is sinister, not funny.
But who believes their gut these days?
We now have the two biggest and most sinister phonies in US electoral history.
Shakespeare, of course, fully understood this dynamic, which he described in Hamlet. In that play, Hamlet spoke of his uncle, who had murdered Hamlet’s father (the true king) and married Hamlet’s mother. At the very beginning of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Hamlet says,
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.
Shakespeare knew about fake laughter because he lived on the fringes of Elizabeth I’s royal court when the courtiers specialized in fake laughter, but the court was riven with mistrust. The United States now has two fake laughers leading the most dangerous major party in history.