Shared Hilarity

by Christopher Hitchens

Laughter can be the most unpleasant sound; it's an essential element in mob conduct and is part of the background noise of taunting and jeering at lynchings and executions. Very often, crowds and audiences will laugh complicitly or slavishly, just to show they "see" the joke and are all together. (The worst case here is the unfunny racist joke, requiring the least effort to trigger a laugh response. But there are also consensus comedies so awful that they require the post-Pavlovian imposition of a dubbed-in "laugh track.") It's therefore not true to say, as some optimists do, that humor is essentially subversive. It can be an appeal to the familiar and the clichéd, a source of reassurance through shared hilarity.

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Christopher Hitchens was an English intellectual, polemicist, and socio-political critic who expressed himself as an author, orator, essayist, journalist and columnist. His six sentences are excerpted from Letters to a Young Contrarian, published in 2001.