Kamala Harris’ laughter has stirred criticism that taps into centuries-old misogyny. This article links her detractors to medieval fears of humor’s power to challenge authority.
By Richard Utz
Some weeks ago, I encountered two apparently unrelated cultural moments within the same hour: The first one was a newsreport that Russia’s Vladimir Putin had offered an sarcastic endorsement of Kamala Harris for President. He stated: “She laughs so expressively and infectiously that it means that everything is fine with her.” Half an hour later I was deep into rereading Umberto Eco’s 1984 bestseller, The Name of the Rose, chancing upon the section in which the learned librarian, Jorge of Burgos, denounces laughter as a devilish wind that deforms the face, makes men look like monkeys, and disrupts and subverts society, religion, and truth. Jorge is particularly afraid that laughter and comedy may lead to people questioning how he and other religious leaders govern, and he is willing to kill people to prevent them from access to texts that advocate for the positive role of humor in society. The 1986 movie version, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, condenses the longer discussion in the novel.
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Why did the accidental encounter of these cultural moments make associative sense to me as someone who engages with the afterlife of medieval culture in postmedieval times? Well, Putin’s ironic statement was meant to deride Harris, implying that all she had going for herself was a simplistic and superficial form of happiness. His ironic dismissal of Harris indicates patriarchal condescension, an attitude toward someone inferior. However, Putin’s addition of a second adjective, “infectious,” suggests that he may not feel entirely sure about his superiority. Rather, like Jorge, he experiences an existential fear that Harris’ laughter might spread, like an airborne virus, and could become a threat to authority and authoritarianism.
Beyond this, Jorge of Burgos and Putin share a deep-seated misogyny: Putin feels the need to control and intimidate politically powerful women, once brought a large dog to his meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel after hearing she was afraid of dogs; he wants Russian women to churn out more children to produce a new generation of soldiers and embrace patriotism over feminism; and he generally performs the kind of public macho masculinity that taps into Russia’s fathomless well of old-style sexism. Jorge of Burgos, the librarian, has absolute control over access to knowledge in the male community of his monastery, and he is convinced his immature, childlike monks ‘can’t handle the truth’ and would lose their fear of God (and the religious hierarchy) if they had access to Aristotle’s theories on comedy and humor. Both Putin and Jorge have almost absolute control over the cosmos in which they operate. When challenged, they will go to extremes in the defense of their stranglehold on power: Jorge poisons his fellow monks or has them killed by a subordinate; Putin has his opponents imprisoned or poisoned, for example, Aleksei Navalny, Anna Politkovskaya, and Natalya Estemirova.
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Putin isn’t imitating Umberto Eco’s character, Jorge of Burgos, of course, but the longevity of premodern traditions and how they infuse contemporary culture and politics should not be underestimated. The misogyny shared by Jorge and Putin is interconnected, and much of its history originates in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trickling down into modern European culture (and its colonies) via different iterations of Christianity. The alliance between conservative Catholic and Protestant Christianity and contemporary patriarchal authoritarianism is visible in Viktor Orbán’s alliance with church leaders in Hungary. In Russia, Putin’s close alliance with the Orthodox church and its medievalist male-centered traditions has offered a spiritual foundation for his position as absolute ruler. He consciously constructs a premodern Christian and Slavic heroic past which he uses to prefigure and justify his own authoritarian rulership.
As I kept thinking about Jorge of Burgos and Vladimir Putin, political ads and TikTok memes from the current electoral campaign kept welling up. While reviewing them on my phone, I found ample confirmation that women’s unauthorized laughter is still considered a disturbance, and even a sickness, by its discontents. It also seems as if gendered modern science and psychology seamlessly adopted the Christian tradition of medieval misogyny into their theories and methodologies. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, women’s laughter (similar to women’s sexual pleasure) was diagnosed as a form of hysteria with recommendations for control, policing, and psychiatric treatment.
Former president Trump’s campaign managers and many of his supporters connect directly to these misogynistic continuities: The National Republican Senatorial Committee commented that Vice-President Harris had “a habit of laughing at inappropriate moments.” Donald Trump tried to brand her with the epithet of “laughing Kamala” and diagnosed her as “crazy” and “nuts” based on her “cackle.” Apparently, his father Fred had once toldhim that “laughing is to make yourself vulnerable, it’s to let down your guard in some way, it’s to lose a little bit of control. And that can’t happen.”
A fool making a face – Getty Ms. 46 fol. 72
Harris is aware of the attempts at branding her (and all women’s) public laughter as suspicious and irrational. She normalizes it as part of a family tradition (“I have my mother’s laugh. I grew up with a bunch of women … who laughed from the belly.”) and values its liberating and empowering aspects, recommending to younger women not “to be confined to other people’s perception about what this looks like or how you should act in order to be.” Clearly, she is in a better place than Hillary Clinton during her unsuccessful bid for the White House in 2016. She, too, was mercilessly ridiculed for her allegedly unpresidential cackle by those who harnessed against her the cultural prejudice about women expressing joy and humor in public.
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The “infectious” nature of Harris’ laughter has been especially galling to her opponents because Donald Trump’s candidate for Vice President, J.D. Vance, although a man and therefore without restrictions to laughing in public, keeps failing at breaking the ice via laughter and jokes with his audiences. As one observer commented, Vance’s uneasiness with “a reaction so elemental that babies master it within their first six months dovetails with the sense that he’s generally uncomfortable with normal human interactions.” As a consequence, the Democratic campaign has now dubbed Vance “weird,” reversing the implication of the “laughing Kamala” epithet and instead implying Vance might be the one suffering from some unspecified condition.
Vance converted to Catholicism around 2019 because his Yale education and career choices did not offer him the spiritual fulfillment he sought. The brand of Catholicism to which he feels drawn calls itself “postliberal,” and its adherents “share some longstanding Catholic conservative views, such as opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.” Postliberals often express nostalgia for Catholic Spain as it was run by dictator Francesco Franco (his educational curricula forbade girls to laugh and sneeze) and praise Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, for his policies that incentivize women having more babies. Vance himself prefers for women to concentrate on traditional roles: bearing and raising children if premenopausal; raising grandchildren if postmenopausal; and not divorcing abusive husbands.
Vance, too, has found Vice President Harris’ laughter disturbing, in a statement that very much resembles how medievalist Umberto Eco summarizes conservative medieval theologians’ opposition to laughter as expounded by Jorge of Burgos: “She says she’s having fun, but while she’s having fun, Americans are suffering under her policies,” [Vance] said. “When she laughs during a speech, remember that there are American families crying this very day because they cannot afford groceries. When she does these rallies and does these events, and does these fake dances, remember that there are parents who lost their children to drugs or violence who will never see their children move again, much less dance again.”
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Harris lacks, so Vance, an understanding of the graveness of the world’s problems or, as Jorge of Burgos explains in the novel: “Look at the young monks who shamelessly read the parodizing buffoonery of the Coena Cypriani. What a diabolical transfiguration of the Holy Scripture! …The prudence of our fathers made its choice: if laughter is the delight of the plebeians, the license of the plebeians must be restrained and humiliated, and intimidated by sternness.” Like Jorge, Vance views himself as a patrician, while he sees Harris, like the immature monks in Jorge’s abbey, lacking adult male postliberal gravitas and thus too easily corrupted by plebeian pleasures.
What unites the current voices critical of women’s laughter is that all of them believe in “the prudence of our fathers,” yearn back to an imagined premodern past during which, they think, women’s roles were appropriately limited and regulated. That is why I immediately associated the news report about “Kamala’s Laughter” and Jorge of Burgos’ diatribe against laughter. Most of those who chide Kamala Harris for apparently enjoying life and laughing out loud may not recognize their own medievalism, their adherence to the ideals of medieval misogyny codified by medieval theologians and revitalized in later centuries by reactionary Catholics and Protestants. I wonder if this misogyny might reveal itself to Harris’ U.S. critics were they to consider that laughter was also among the activities forbidden to women after Afghanistan’s recent takeover by the Taliban, the Sunni Islamist nationalist and pro-Pashtun movement whom conservatives have been denouncing as “medieval thugs.”
Barry Sanders entitled his 1996 cultural history of laughter Sudden Glory, hinting at the surprising and subversive power of laughter. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, another authoritarian leader who linked medievalism with Christian nationalism, seemed to channel Jorge of Burgos’ fear of this subversive quality of laughter when he had his military police clamp down on palhaçaria feminina, women’s public clowning performances. Similarly, the Taliban prohibit women’s laughter (and women’s speech and agency in general) not only because it is “provocative towards men,” but also because “it involves invading the realm of decision-making and male political positioning that they make traditionally theirs.” Kamala Harris’ laughter may be under attack for the same reasons, continuing cultural traditions whose origins reach back many centuries.
Richard Utz is Professor of Medievalism Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Top Image: Kamala Harris speaking at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco, California. Photo by Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons
Kamala Harris’ laughter has stirred criticism that taps into centuries-old misogyny. This article links her detractors to medieval fears of humor’s power to challenge authority.
By Richard Utz
Some weeks ago, I encountered two apparently unrelated cultural moments within the same hour: The first one was a news report that Russia’s Vladimir Putin had offered an sarcastic endorsement of Kamala Harris for President. He stated: “She laughs so expressively and infectiously that it means that everything is fine with her.” Half an hour later I was deep into rereading Umberto Eco’s 1984 bestseller, The Name of the Rose, chancing upon the section in which the learned librarian, Jorge of Burgos, denounces laughter as a devilish wind that deforms the face, makes men look like monkeys, and disrupts and subverts society, religion, and truth. Jorge is particularly afraid that laughter and comedy may lead to people questioning how he and other religious leaders govern, and he is willing to kill people to prevent them from access to texts that advocate for the positive role of humor in society. The 1986 movie version, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, condenses the longer discussion in the novel.
Why did the accidental encounter of these cultural moments make associative sense to me as someone who engages with the afterlife of medieval culture in postmedieval times? Well, Putin’s ironic statement was meant to deride Harris, implying that all she had going for herself was a simplistic and superficial form of happiness. His ironic dismissal of Harris indicates patriarchal condescension, an attitude toward someone inferior. However, Putin’s addition of a second adjective, “infectious,” suggests that he may not feel entirely sure about his superiority. Rather, like Jorge, he experiences an existential fear that Harris’ laughter might spread, like an airborne virus, and could become a threat to authority and authoritarianism.
Beyond this, Jorge of Burgos and Putin share a deep-seated misogyny: Putin feels the need to control and intimidate politically powerful women, once brought a large dog to his meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel after hearing she was afraid of dogs; he wants Russian women to churn out more children to produce a new generation of soldiers and embrace patriotism over feminism; and he generally performs the kind of public macho masculinity that taps into Russia’s fathomless well of old-style sexism. Jorge of Burgos, the librarian, has absolute control over access to knowledge in the male community of his monastery, and he is convinced his immature, childlike monks ‘can’t handle the truth’ and would lose their fear of God (and the religious hierarchy) if they had access to Aristotle’s theories on comedy and humor. Both Putin and Jorge have almost absolute control over the cosmos in which they operate. When challenged, they will go to extremes in the defense of their stranglehold on power: Jorge poisons his fellow monks or has them killed by a subordinate; Putin has his opponents imprisoned or poisoned, for example, Aleksei Navalny, Anna Politkovskaya, and Natalya Estemirova.
Putin isn’t imitating Umberto Eco’s character, Jorge of Burgos, of course, but the longevity of premodern traditions and how they infuse contemporary culture and politics should not be underestimated. The misogyny shared by Jorge and Putin is interconnected, and much of its history originates in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trickling down into modern European culture (and its colonies) via different iterations of Christianity. The alliance between conservative Catholic and Protestant Christianity and contemporary patriarchal authoritarianism is visible in Viktor Orbán’s alliance with church leaders in Hungary. In Russia, Putin’s close alliance with the Orthodox church and its medievalist male-centered traditions has offered a spiritual foundation for his position as absolute ruler. He consciously constructs a premodern Christian and Slavic heroic past which he uses to prefigure and justify his own authoritarian rulership.
As I kept thinking about Jorge of Burgos and Vladimir Putin, political ads and TikTok memes from the current electoral campaign kept welling up. While reviewing them on my phone, I found ample confirmation that women’s unauthorized laughter is still considered a disturbance, and even a sickness, by its discontents. It also seems as if gendered modern science and psychology seamlessly adopted the Christian tradition of medieval misogyny into their theories and methodologies. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, women’s laughter (similar to women’s sexual pleasure) was diagnosed as a form of hysteria with recommendations for control, policing, and psychiatric treatment.
Former president Trump’s campaign managers and many of his supporters connect directly to these misogynistic continuities: The National Republican Senatorial Committee commented that Vice-President Harris had “a habit of laughing at inappropriate moments.” Donald Trump tried to brand her with the epithet of “laughing Kamala” and diagnosed her as “crazy” and “nuts” based on her “cackle.” Apparently, his father Fred had once told him that “laughing is to make yourself vulnerable, it’s to let down your guard in some way, it’s to lose a little bit of control. And that can’t happen.”
Harris is aware of the attempts at branding her (and all women’s) public laughter as suspicious and irrational. She normalizes it as part of a family tradition (“I have my mother’s laugh. I grew up with a bunch of women … who laughed from the belly.”) and values its liberating and empowering aspects, recommending to younger women not “to be confined to other people’s perception about what this looks like or how you should act in order to be.” Clearly, she is in a better place than Hillary Clinton during her unsuccessful bid for the White House in 2016. She, too, was mercilessly ridiculed for her allegedly unpresidential cackle by those who harnessed against her the cultural prejudice about women expressing joy and humor in public.
The “infectious” nature of Harris’ laughter has been especially galling to her opponents because Donald Trump’s candidate for Vice President, J.D. Vance, although a man and therefore without restrictions to laughing in public, keeps failing at breaking the ice via laughter and jokes with his audiences. As one observer commented, Vance’s uneasiness with “a reaction so elemental that babies master it within their first six months dovetails with the sense that he’s generally uncomfortable with normal human interactions.” As a consequence, the Democratic campaign has now dubbed Vance “weird,” reversing the implication of the “laughing Kamala” epithet and instead implying Vance might be the one suffering from some unspecified condition.
Vance converted to Catholicism around 2019 because his Yale education and career choices did not offer him the spiritual fulfillment he sought. The brand of Catholicism to which he feels drawn calls itself “postliberal,” and its adherents “share some longstanding Catholic conservative views, such as opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.” Postliberals often express nostalgia for Catholic Spain as it was run by dictator Francesco Franco (his educational curricula forbade girls to laugh and sneeze) and praise Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, for his policies that incentivize women having more babies. Vance himself prefers for women to concentrate on traditional roles: bearing and raising children if premenopausal; raising grandchildren if postmenopausal; and not divorcing abusive husbands.
Vance, too, has found Vice President Harris’ laughter disturbing, in a statement that very much resembles how medievalist Umberto Eco summarizes conservative medieval theologians’ opposition to laughter as expounded by Jorge of Burgos: “She says she’s having fun, but while she’s having fun, Americans are suffering under her policies,” [Vance] said. “When she laughs during a speech, remember that there are American families crying this very day because they cannot afford groceries. When she does these rallies and does these events, and does these fake dances, remember that there are parents who lost their children to drugs or violence who will never see their children move again, much less dance again.”
Harris lacks, so Vance, an understanding of the graveness of the world’s problems or, as Jorge of Burgos explains in the novel: “Look at the young monks who shamelessly read the parodizing buffoonery of the Coena Cypriani. What a diabolical transfiguration of the Holy Scripture! … The prudence of our fathers made its choice: if laughter is the delight of the plebeians, the license of the plebeians must be restrained and humiliated, and intimidated by sternness.” Like Jorge, Vance views himself as a patrician, while he sees Harris, like the immature monks in Jorge’s abbey, lacking adult male postliberal gravitas and thus too easily corrupted by plebeian pleasures.
What unites the current voices critical of women’s laughter is that all of them believe in “the prudence of our fathers,” yearn back to an imagined premodern past during which, they think, women’s roles were appropriately limited and regulated. That is why I immediately associated the news report about “Kamala’s Laughter” and Jorge of Burgos’ diatribe against laughter. Most of those who chide Kamala Harris for apparently enjoying life and laughing out loud may not recognize their own medievalism, their adherence to the ideals of medieval misogyny codified by medieval theologians and revitalized in later centuries by reactionary Catholics and Protestants. I wonder if this misogyny might reveal itself to Harris’ U.S. critics were they to consider that laughter was also among the activities forbidden to women after Afghanistan’s recent takeover by the Taliban, the Sunni Islamist nationalist and pro-Pashtun movement whom conservatives have been denouncing as “medieval thugs.”
Barry Sanders entitled his 1996 cultural history of laughter Sudden Glory, hinting at the surprising and subversive power of laughter. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, another authoritarian leader who linked medievalism with Christian nationalism, seemed to channel Jorge of Burgos’ fear of this subversive quality of laughter when he had his military police clamp down on palhaçaria feminina, women’s public clowning performances. Similarly, the Taliban prohibit women’s laughter (and women’s speech and agency in general) not only because it is “provocative towards men,” but also because “it involves invading the realm of decision-making and male political positioning that they make traditionally theirs.” Kamala Harris’ laughter may be under attack for the same reasons, continuing cultural traditions whose origins reach back many centuries.
Richard Utz is Professor of Medievalism Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Top Image: Kamala Harris speaking at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco, California. Photo by Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons
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