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To me the beauty of laughter is that it is involuntary, and it is very closely related to truth. We can all tell when it's fake, which is probably what makes it so subversive. There is an undercurrent in some pop culture right now that humor is a tool of oppression, which really means that humor is the most dangerous threat to someone's plans for oppression, as you can't get people to commit in earnest to ostensibly necessary evils if they can't keep a straight face.

This idea of civil vs. uncivil mirth sets up a false dichotomy to wedge in a critical theory about what is acceptable mirth and what is not. Demagogues fear it because humor destroys ideology/narrative, and the early rounds of what is now popularly called cancel culture were all about neutralizing the effects of dangerous comedians for this reason, I think. No doubt this article won't be the last we hear about critical theories of humor as an attempt to neutralize it further.