We take laughter for granted; I never think much about it. I love to laugh, and I love to make people laugh, and I’m pretty good at it.

But the people in control of our government never make anyone laugh, not deliberately, and certainly not when they are breaking up and abusing families or arresting them. 

Rather than merely reacting to jokes, research shows that laughter is primarily a primitive mechanism for survival, social bonding, and stress regulation.

Laughter is extensively studied across evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, and medicine. The formal study of laughter and its physiological effects is known as gelotology.

It’s also no joke:

It’s important; I’ve spent some time this week researching it, and it seems to me that it says a great deal about Donald Trump and the people around him, and the impact they are having on our country and culture.

(I now believe laughter will determine the outcomes of the coming election.)

Laughter, the brainacs say, is essential for health and for humanity. Laughter allows humans to bond with multiple individuals simultaneously, enabling larger, more cooperative societies. (Like politics used to be.)

It seems that without laughter, there are no cooperative cultures and societies. Once upon a time, politicians in Washington roomed together, ate together, laughed together. Then the haters took over. Laughter disappeared. 

Hmmm. I never looked at it that way, but when I thought about it, I realized that among other things, Trump has managed to do is to remove laughter from our civic life, political system, and much of our society, from the vicious assault on political opponents, peaceful and hardworking immigrants to the journalists, women, and others in our culture that he attacks in the cruelest ways possible.

He never smiles, and he never laughs, and the people around him rarely smile and never laugh and seem unable to laugh about themselves or be laughed at. They are not allowed to laugh.

And his war on TV comedians who poke fun at him is, after all, nothing but a crusade against laughing, one of the last places in American media to permit it.

The truth is, aside from their politics, I can’t bear to be around people I can’t laugh with or who can’t laugh about themselves.

And yes, the people I love – Maria, my daughter, my friends – laugh at me all the time and poke fast holes if my ego balloons. Laughter keeps me humble.

When I stumble, laughter picks me up.

______

______

Donald Trump not only can’t laugh at himself, but he can’t bear being laughed at. That makes for an unhappy country. He does seem able to hate people he thinks don’t love him.

There are lots of them by now.

Since laughing is both an essential and almost universal human experience, it throws cooperative cultures like politics and human relations into chaos. Many of the politicians I see on TV or the Internet are humorless now, as if they dare not laugh in public.

Good friends laugh with one another. It’s built into our DNA.

My sense of the increasingly extremist republican Party is that they stopped laughing about 15 years ago and began to become a humorless and judgmental culture. They got greedy.

Day by day, they’ve labeled all kinds of cultures and people who differ (or laugh) as evil and dangerous. They are now hating and persecuting almost every kind of people who laugh or even smile.

As laughter fades, so does the mood; peace of mind fades with it. It seems Mr. Trump and his MAGA Army never run out of people to hate, harass, frighten, and kick out of the country. There is less and less to laugh about.

Marjorie Taylor Greene illustrates what I’m talking about. I have little in common with her politics, but I like her sense of humor and her ability to laugh at others and herself. I knew she would get into trouble with the humorless legions who see Mr. Trump as a God.

(Taylor laughed plenty of times in Congress. She laughed on camera fairly regularly, including at her own jokes during floor speeches and interviews, and there’s footage of her cracking up during committee hearings and press events.)

I also think of  Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Rep, the very bright and often humorous congressman. He had a rich and biting sense of humor, and I realized that no one with a sense of humor is ever seen around Mr. Trump or survives him for long. Hating requires a lot of discipline.

President Trump’s Cabinet meetings are almost as funny as a funeral wake. Journalists are never allowed to smile or laugh around him; they must look grim and walk softly. And know how to be reverent.

What is so important about laughing is that it is most important and healthiest when we can laugh at ourselves. Laughing at myself has been good for me. It softens failure or disappointment, diffuses argument, and heals misunderstandings. When I’m low, laughter always lifts me.

Among his many other failings, Mr. Trump has turned our world into a trembling, humorless place; if you watch any of his endless press conferences and announcements, you will notice that none of the people around him ever laugh, except when ordered to or to please their King.

That should not be a surprise. I can’t imagine working around him or the people around him. They are beyond grim, the fear of offending their leader all over their faces.

One thing I like about the new young socialists terrifying the old farts of the nation is that they laugh all the time, even at the hatred surrounding them.

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the mayor of New York, laughs at himself constantly grinning all the way, and so does the other politician everyone is talking about – Abdul El-Sayed.

El- Sayed is the anti-Trump; he is laughing and funny almost all of the time, even when he is being attacked, which is almost always. He is the Humorless Trump Administration’s Worst Nightmare; he laughs way too much. Thus would never function in Congress.

In our new grim society, the obstacles to laughter pass as virtues in the people who possess them. I call it Negative Spirituality, a grim, even hateful approach to life in the name of righteousness.

These are the dangerous ones, the ones who have taken over our country, bit by bit. They pass judgment on all of us, good or bad, black or white or brown or Trans or “woke.” I think that about covers all of them.

They are humorless leaders who believe they have been chosen as harbingers of God’s wrath. Jesus would hate everything about them, but that seems to be beside the point.

Their legacy is to make holiness a plague rather than a passion.

It’s no accident that those idealistic young people are winning elections all over the country. They all smile and laugh, and their laughter will bring laughter back, helping restore our connections to one another.

That’s nothing to laugh about.

______

(P.S. Ethologists note that human laughter likely evolved from the “play panting” of ancestral apes during mock fighting. In social settings, laughter signals to the group that a potential threat or unexpected event is harmless—effectively broadcasting, “We are safe, you can drop your guard.”

It seems our humorless leadership believes every potential threat is real, and that our country is never safe. They insist that the more we hate, the safer the country will be. Think of the hated “woke.”