Who’s kidding who?

Even those who fear nothing fear laughter. — Nikolai Gogol

But I didn’t see that the joke was on me. — Robin Gibb

In 2012, a dozen years before Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was fatally poisoned at a remote penal colony above the Arctic Circle on what were almost certainly orders from President Vladimir Putin, the anti-corruption activist survived an assassination attempt by Russian security services agents.

While Navalny was away from his hotel room during a campaign trip to the Siberian city of Tomsk, Putin’s hitmen dabbed his signature poison, the deadly nerve agent Novichok, on Navalny’s underwear (straight out of an Austin Powers flick but I am not making this up).

In an essay titled “Navalny’s Unfinished Work” that appeared this month in The New York Review of Books, American historian Benjamin Nathans picks up the story:

After spending two weeks in a coma in a German hospital to which he had been airlifted, (Navalny) began referring to Putin — who was fond of comparing himself to historic state builders such as Yaroslav the Wise and Peter the Great — as “Vladimir, Poisoner of Underpants.”

Such quips probably helped Navalny cope with whatever anxiety he felt as the Kremlin’s noose tightened around him. They may also have been intended to inspire his supporters to overcome their own fears. A similar melding of humor and indignation characterized the huge street protests against electoral fraud in Moscow and other Russian cities in 2011-2013, notable for their homemade signs featuring witty slogans and wordplay of the sort familiar to Americans from No Kings demonstrations, late-night talk shows, and countless Instagram posts. I can’t help wondering whether this genre of political humor, ubiquitous among global progressives, serves mostly as an escape valve for pent-up frustration, sublimating outrage at corruption and misrule into sound bites and memes rather than channeling it into political action.

Having often felt the same way, I can’t help wondering whether Nathans has touched on a profoundly paradoxical fact about contemporary political life.

Are the Jimmy Kimmels and the Seth Meyers and the Stephen Colberts and the John Olivers and the Jon Stewarts and their countless imitators on Instagram and YouTube and all the rest actually benefitting Donald Trump’s excremental rainbow of all the shitheads and the sharpies of America by transmuting the outrage that should be producing effective opposition into a crippling sense of absurdity and debilitating illusion of powerlessness?

Moreover, if there’s some truth in this, are the loathsome lackeys and sycophants and toadies on the Trump team making a mistake by coming after late-night comedy critics? Colbert is gone. Kimmel is in their sights. It kind of feels like the same mistake they made in Iran by taking out the leadership in the early days of the war, leaving them facing a more robust, more effective and more determined foe.

But is there any truth to the supposition?

Since one of the more durable fantasies of educated liberals is that information is intrinsically emancipatory — that if enough people are exposed to enough facts, hypocrisy will become unsustainable, corruption intolerable and demagogues impossible — it’s at least worth considering the possibility that political comedy functions as a kind of emotional derivative market, allowing citizens to experience the psychic sensation of resistance without the inconvenience of actually resisting.

This is not, to be clear, a new thought. Every generation rediscovers it, usually after losing an election it was certain reality itself would prevent. In his Poetics, Aristotle’s musings about the cathartic effects of dramatic tragedy — how experiencing deep emotions in a safe, controlled environment can calm our nerves and purge impulses to act — apply equally well to comedy.

Like the Greeks before them (think Aristophanes, Menippus, Cratinus, Eupolis), the Romans had satirists galore (with Juvenal and Horace at the head of the class). The French had cabarets. The Soviets had kitchen jokes.

In his NYRB review of the English translation of Navalny’s Patriot: A Memoir, the Russian edition of which concludes with Navalny’s handwritten assurance that “Russia will be happy!”, Nathans notes that Soviet dissidents of the last century had a mordant expression for that kind of thinking: “A pessimist is one who says things are absolutely the worst they could be, and an optimist is one who says no: things could be worse.”

Not funny ha-ha, perhaps. But funny ow-ow.

We North Americans have late-night television and now the infinitely more efficient joke-processing machine of social media, where outrage enters one end of the digestive tract and emerges, seconds later, as a meme featuring a distracted boyfriend, a Wojak, or a picture of J.D. Vance wiping snot on a chair that requires no caption whatsoever.

The difficult question is whether these jokes are pressure valves or pressure cookers.

Because there is also an argument — one Navalny himself seems to have understood — that ridicule can be politically lethal in a way indignation often isn’t. Power has an easier time defending itself against moral condemnation than against mockery. A tyrant can present himself as misunderstood, persecuted, even heroic in the face of criticism. As that unmatched master of the grotesque, 19th-century Russian/Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol, was suggesting in the quotation that opened this, what a despot cannot easily survive is becoming ridiculous.

Or so one would have thought until the Age of Trump, when a third of Americans appear to be so staggeringly ignorant, racist and credulous that they can’t understand how they’re being played. Dylan nailed it way back in ’64 in the lyrics to Only a Pawn in Their Game: A South politician preaches to the poor white man “You got more than the blacks, don't complain You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain And the Negro’s name Is used, it is plain For the politician’s gain As he rises to fame And the poor white remains On the caboose of the train But it ain’t him to blame He’s only a pawn in their game.

Thing is, the irresistible impulse to poke fun at the gormless goobers who stand behind Trump as a cheering backdrop at his Nuremberg Rallies triggers a counterproductive response as they instinctively double down on the madness. We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee.

An analogous dynamic in Britain was largely responsible for Brexit, now regretted by most of the population, and you can witness a similar worrisome scenario unspooling in the current Alberta separatism debate. I seen Billy Jack.

This is one reason authoritarian regimes seem to possess such astonishingly poor senses of humour. They are not humourless because they are stupid. They are humourless because they understand something many comedians don’t, viz., prestige and fear are joined at the hip. Once people stop being afraid to laugh, they may soon stop being afraid altogether.

Putin appears to have grasped this. It is hard to imagine that the phrase “Vladimir, Poisoner of Underpants” failed to bother him. Here is a man who cultivates the image of a latter-day tsar, a geopolitical chess grandmaster, a shirtless horse-riding embodiment of Russian destiny — and suddenly he finds himself transformed into the world’s most dangerous department-store pervert. A 5’5” pervert to boot.

The remarkable thing about the nickname is not merely that it is funny. It is that it collapses the vast machinery of state terror into something embarrassingly domestic. Not the fearsome apparatus of the security services. Not the grim architecture of dictatorship. Underpants.

The same thing happened, in a different register, with Trump. One reason his opponents have always seemed uncertain whether to portray him as the Orange Julius Caesar or as a game-show host is that he is simultaneously both. The comparison to history’s monsters feels morally urgent, but it also tends to inflate him into exactly the sort of world-historical figure he desperately wants to be.

Mockery, by contrast, shrinks him. It turns the authoritarian strongman into a demented crank posting at 2:17 a.m. about television ratings. Nostra-Dumbass. Jabba the Pizza Hut. Velveeto Corleone, to use a few of the satirical monikers gleefully pinned on the Commander-in-Thief by Kimmel alone. (In this corner, we’re especially partial to Pumpkin McPornhumper.)

The complication is that shrinking a figure like Mar-a-Lardo (last one; promise) psychologically is not the same thing as defeating him politically.

In fact, one of the weirdest features of the Trump era has been the extent to which many of his opponents have confused the two. Every night, somewhere in America, a viewer receives a perfectly calibrated dose of satirical catharsis. Trump says something deranged. A host rolls his eyes. The audience applauds. The host makes a joke involving Sharpies, tanning products, authoritarianism, or all three. The audience applauds again. Neurochemicals are released. The viewer goes to bed having experienced something very much like political participation despite never leaving the couch.

In 1969, when CBS abruptly cancelled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for pushing the boundaries by featuring pro-civil rights material and anti-Vietnam War commentary, there was nowhere for progressives who shared these views to go but into the streets to protest.

In contrast, after thoroughly enjoying Stewart’s skewering of the Trump administration’s disastrous Iranian “excursion” on Monday’s edition of The Daily Show, I went to bed — shaking my head over Trump’s obsequious retreat and highly entertained by Stewart’s witty barbs and facial calisthenics.

This is not nothing. Emotional survival matters. Despair is politically useless. Yet there remains an uncomfortable possibility that the entertainment industry’s genius has been to monetize opposition itself, converting democratic energy into content.

Think Aldous Huxley’s fictitious pleasure-drug soma in 1932’s Brave New World. Think Neil Postman’s warnings in 1985’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Think John Lennon’s scathing commentary in 1970’s Working Class Hero: Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV And you think you’re so clever and classless and free But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

One can almost imagine an enormous invisible refinery somewhere beneath Manhattan. Raw outrage goes in. Monologues, podcasts, reaction videos, Substacks, TikToks, quote-tweets, and tasteful tote bags come out.

The refinery employs thousands.

Yet if Ben Nathans’s speculation is even partially correct, MAGA world’s instinctive hostility toward comedians becomes harder to understand. Why eliminate a mechanism that may be helping metabolize opposition into manageable forms? Why remove one of the institutions most effective at transforming fury into spectatorship?

It resembles certain military blunders in which an enemy accidentally destroys the very structures that were helping stabilize the situation. The comparison to Iran is imperfect but illustrative. Decapitation strikes often satisfy an immediate emotional urge while creating downstream consequences nobody intended. Remove leadership and you sometimes get chaos. Remove institutions and you sometimes get radicalization.

Remove comedians and you may discover that what was previously being converted into jokes is now being converted into organization. A punch line that’s actually a punch line.

Or not. This is where all grand theories of politics begin to wobble. Human beings are too strange and history too nonlinear for clean causal stories. The same joke can pacify one person and radicalize another. One viewer watches Stewart and feels smugly reassured. Another watches one of Meyers’s scintillating A Closer Look segments and decides to volunteer for a campaign. A third falls asleep halfway through the monologue and dreams about minks chasing rabbits.

The social sciences, despite heroic efforts involving regressions, confidence intervals and graduate students consuming heroic quantities of cold brew, remain frustratingly unable to determine which outcome predominates.

Still, there is something darkly amusing about the possibility that the culture warriors targeting comedians have misunderstood the role comedians play. It would be a very twenty-first-century error: mistaking the commentary for the movement, the symptom for the disease, the meme for the mob.

Funny ow-ow.

The rulers of every age eventually become obsessed with whoever is making fun of them. Kings hated jesters. Tsars hated pamphleteers. Dictators hate cartoonists. The temptation is understandable. Nobody enjoys being laughed at.

But history suggests that when authorities start treating comedians as existential threats, it is often because they have forgotten a more dangerous possibility: that the audience might someday stop laughing and start doing something else.

One thing’s for sure. If Mad King Lear had only listened to the Fool, who alone spoke truth to power, there would have been a lot less blood for the stagehands to mop up.