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When I was in high school, my classmates and I marveled at the biting sarcasm of our Spanish teacher. (Shout-out to the peerless Señor Householder.) When someone finally asked him about his sense of humor, he attributed it to growing up during Francisco Franco’s regime: Under a repressive government, citizens gravitated to sarcastic jokes because they were a form of  dissent more likely to escape official notice or punishment.

I’m not sure why that anecdote has stuck with me for so long, but as the Trump administration seeks to ban disfavored language and disappear people, it’s felt disconcertingly relevant. Although journalists have long been aficionados of black humor—working in a collapsing industry will do that to you—I’ve sensed an uptick in black humor among others in my life recently. Living in a collapsing democracy will do that to you.

“It’s a way of expressing solidarity in the face of overwhelming malice. Authoritarians depend on an appearance of inevitability, and satire and mockery at least help to undermine that, a (very) little bit,” the cartoonist Dan Perkins, better known as Tom Tomorrow, wrote to me in an email. “Satire provides an outlet, for both creator and reader—at the very least, you can laugh at the malevolent incompetence of it all.”

Laughter is also self-defense. Sigmund Freud, who knew a thing or two about collapsing societies, argued that “humor acknowledges the existence of the threatening affect and transforms it through the mechanisms … into pleasurable affect,” the psychologists Maria Christoff and Barry Dauphin write, translating Freud into (slightly) more intelligible terms.

That defense mechanism becomes more important in times of repression or chaos. In 1930s Poland, for example, Yiddish-language “joke pages” flourished. Yiddish humor “has often been characterized by a high degree of self-reflection in the form of self-irony … and read as a response to or defence against the steadily deteriorating living conditions of Jews in eastern Europe and elsewhere,” Anne-Christin Klotz and Gwen Jones wrote recently.

Sardonic jokes circulated like samizdat in Communist East Germany. One gag: “Did East Germans originate from apes? Impossible. Apes could never have survived on just two bananas a year.” And like samizdat, this humor could get you in serious trouble: 64 East Germans were imprisoned for telling political jokes. Naturally, this became fodder for meta jokes: “There are people who tell jokes. There are people who collect jokes and tell jokes. And there are people who collect people who tell jokes.”

Absurdity can seem like the only recourse in a situation where the state is, itself, absurd. After snarky Chinese social-media users noticed a striking similarity between Xi Jinping and Winnie-the-Pooh, the bear became a popular online stand-in for Xi, thus leading the government to at times censor Pooh images. (Commissars are more horrible than any heffalump could ever be.)

Authoritarian leaders are adept at using humor for their own political purposes. Stephen Gundle writes that Italian fascists “were loud, raucous and thuggish and they prided themselves on their coarse, swaggering manner.” Their laughter, he writes, “was cruel, crude and mocking.” Perhaps this sounds familiar. The television critic Emily Nussbaum wrote in 2017 that jokes were an important part of Donald Trump’s appeal and success: “His rallies boiled with rage and laughter, which were hard to tell apart. You didn’t have to think that Trump himself was funny to see this effect: I found him repulsive, and yet I could hear those comedy rhythms everywhere.” She wondered, “How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?”

With jokes, of course. The journalist M. Gessen wrote in 2018 about how humor can be a tool of resistance against cruel totalitarian humor. “Jokes,” they wrote, “reclaim the goodness of laughter, for regimes weaponize laughter to mock their opponents, creating what the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym called ‘totalitarian laughter.’ Its opposite is anti-totalitarian laughter.”

Unlike citizens in a democracy, not all laughter is created equal. The comedian Sarah Cooper’s impressions of Trump were wildly popular among the president’s opponents during his first term. Watching them now, I feel not so much that her videos have aged poorly but that I can’t recall why they seemed comedic in the first place. Conventional satire also seems overmatched. What room is there for hyperbole when a 19-year-old known as “Big Balls” has been rampaging through the federal government, perhaps even accessing confidential data?

By contrast, the Sweet Meteor of Death—a meme popularized in 2016 by anti-Trump conservatives who preferred a fiery end to life over either Trump or Hillary Clinton—still feels timely, perhaps because it is so bleak. Macabre jokes may also have special appeal in a moment when high-achieving knowledge workers are targets of Trump’s repression—according to some research, black humor is associated with higher levels of education.

Humor can be a defense mechanism, as Freud argued, but part of the power of the blacker variants is that they acknowledge their own limitations. “I’m sure my wry, observational wit will provide great solace to the other residents of my cell block when I’m eventually renditioned to CECOT!” Perkins told me. One hopes he’s only joking.

Related:

• The most striking thing about Trump’s mockery of Christine Blasey Ford
• Radio Atlantic: Laughing at Trump (From 2024)

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• The harem of Elon Musk
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Today’s News

1. The suspected gunman in yesterday’s Florida State University shooting, which killed two people and injured six others, is in custody.
2. Senator Chris Van Hollen met with Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador yesterday.
3. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that President Donald Trump will walk away from Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations if progress isn’t made in a matter of days.

Dispatches

• Atlantic Intelligence: A new social network is reportedly on the horizon for OpenAI. But is it what the tech company needs? Damon Beres asks Charlie Warzel.
• The Books Briefing: Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan comics are full of unrestrained, devil-may-care attitude, Emma Sarappo writes.

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Evening Read

About That ‘Possible Sign of Life’ on a Distant Planet

By Ross Andersen

Few forms of media can still grab the general public’s lapels and say, “The world has changed in an important way, and you should know about it, now” like a push notification from The New York Times. On Wednesday evening, a particularly enticing one from the Times flashed across millions of lock screens. “Astronomers detected a possible signature of life on a planet orbiting a star 120 light-years away,” it read. Soon after, The Washington Post followed up with a notification of its own, using similar language about a possible sign of life found on a distant planet called K2-18b.

The word possible is doing load-bearing—if not Atlas-like—work in these headlines.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• The lies about Josh Shapiro have consequences, Yair Rosenberg writes.
• The conservative case for leaving Harvard alone
• PBS pulled a film for political reasons, then changed its mind.
• A trade war with China is a very bad idea.

Culture Break

Watch. Sinners (out in theaters) slowly drops its period-drama trappings to become something much scarier, David Sims writes.

Sit with it. Adolescence (streaming on Netflix) plunges viewers into the mindset of a troubled boy—even if it makes them uncomfortable, Paula Mejía writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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