When Gretchen Whitmer ran for Michigan governor in 2018, a debate coach advised her to draw a smiley face at the top of her notes, so that at the podium she’d remember not to frown. Instead, she jotted down a reference to a raunchy joke about a menstruating woman and her horny boyfriend—the punch line ends with “Shark Week”—because it reliably made her laugh. “If you can turn off the volume and just watch and see who looks like they’re having the most fun,” she explained, “they’re almost always the one who wins.” She got a shark tattoo on her shoulder as a permanent reminder “to keep a sense of humor and to be a happy warrior.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has been following that advice. Her high-wattage beams and peals of laughter, her sartorial mash-ups of Chuck Taylors and pearls, and her campaign’s convention theme of “joy” all telegraph a happy-warrior candidacy. “I have my mother’s laugh,” she said on The Drew Barrymore Show in April. “I grew up around a bunch of women in particular who laughed from the belly. They laughed!” And she has no plans to tone it down. “You know, I’m never going to be…” she said…and then laughed. “That’s just, I’m not that person.”
Laughter is not part of Donald Trump’s demeanor. Maybe he’s not good at it. The comedian-magician Penn Jillette, who was a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice, which Trump hosted, said the former president was “someone who has never laughed sincerely and never made a joke.” Trump would laugh “in a bully way,” Jillette said. “‘Ha-ha, you look kinda fat, Joe!’ He’ll do that. But he won’t laugh at himself.”
Reddit forums have been devoted to the search for a single video of Trump genuinely laughing. This quest has uncovered the occasional smirk or snigger, but little suggesting joy or even amusement. At a 2019 campaign rally in Florida, Trump chortled—after an audience member yelled, “Shoot ’em!” in response to his musings on how to stop migrants from coming across the border. And he got off a laugh during a 2016 speech after a dog barked and he said, “What was that?”—and an audience member answered, “Hillary!” Pretty funny.
Side by side on the debate stage last month, Trump’s eternal frown and Harris’s frequent bemusement made for split-screen tragedy-and-comedy masks. No wonder her happiness makes him unhappy. “I call her Laffin’ Kamala,” Trump said. “You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy.” As with all of Trump’s riffs, he’s got this one on auto-replay. “Have you heard her laugh? That is the laugh of a crazy person. That is the laugh of a crazy—the laugh of a lunatic.”
Harris’s lightheartedness runs afoul of a seemingly bedrock political principle that women in the spotlight have fun at their peril and should under no circumstances laugh. France is banning hijabs, the Taliban is forbidding singing by women, and MAGA Republicans are coming up with a female comportment restriction of their own: Thou shalt not laugh in public while politicking. Conservative social media sites feature mixtapes of Harris’s “evil” and “creepy” laugh. Trump surrogates pile on with their own assertions that she “cackles like an insane woman.” Our adversaries in China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are all going to “laugh at Kamala Harris because that’s what she does half the time anyway,” Sean Hannity told Republican senator Lindsey Graham on Fox News. “She giggles away her time. I don’t think they’ll take her seriously because I don’t think she’s a serious person.” A friend of mine in Tucson sent me campaign literature left on her doorstep in late September: “KAMALA’S LAUGHING…BUT ARIZONANS ARE NOT! VOTE EARLY AND STOP CACKLING KAMALA.” Of course, the candidate they’re trying to stop is competent Kamala. They’re levying the charge of levity at her real sin: seriousness.
The mirth moratorium didn’t start yesterday. In 2016 Hillary Clinton’s “cackle” was the mother of all memes on the right-wing Web, which peddled paraphernalia of Clinton as a wicked cachinnating witch (“IF THE SHOE FITS…CACKLE!” read a T-shirt emblazoned with a broom-riding Hillary; the package of a Hillary Clinton Laughing Pen proclaimed, “It’s actually HILLARY’S VOICE!” and, “Mouth really Moves!”) and churned out an endless stream of montages: “Hillary Clinton Laughing for 10 Hours”; “Hillary Clinton Laughing Off Questions Since 2007”; “Every Hillary Clinton Laugh Ever.”
The running-while-laughing offense falls into the category of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Clinton was also condemned for her earnest wonkery, for being too much of a “serious person.” It’s a bind familiar to feminists, who have always been accused of being “humorless” and “killjoys” (Q: “How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?” A: “That’s not funny!”) until they are caught having a guffaw, especially at the expense of the opposite sex. Men covet women’s laughter at their jokes and dread being laughed at by women. “It could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny,” Christopher Hitchens posited in an infamous 2007 essay on women’s lack of wit. Men, he argued, want women “as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit.” The story was titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” and its message seemed to be: if we let women be humorous, it will be the ruin of us. It was illustrated with a photo of a sourpuss beefy babushka, glowering from her lace-curtained window. (Pretty funny.) She looks uncannily like Donald Trump on the debate stage.
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Republican female candidates are sometimes allowed a comic moment, as long as it’s in a bully way. (In one ad, Marjorie Taylor Greene blasted to smithereens a “SOCIALIST” Prius. In another Joni Ernst promised to cut pork on Capitol Hill the way she castrates hogs: “Let’s make ’em squeal!”) Still, they rarely get to laugh.
Harris’s laughter is most often a response to a situation that strikes her as ridiculous. It’s spontaneous, not cruel, though it does usually suggest she’s above the absurdity she’s observing. Her laugh acts as a form of authority. She’s also the one having the most fun.