Are You Laughing At Them, or With Them?

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You hold yourself back from laughing at the man who slips and falls in the street — yet if he gets up and laughs at his own fall, you join in without a second thought. One and the same sound in two states: one of them crushes a person, the other rescues them. So when you laugh, how do you know which one you are doing?

A man is running down the street. He is in a hurry; maybe he is trying to catch a bus, maybe he is very late for someone. His foot catches on a raised edge at the side of the pavement, his balance goes, his arms wheel through the air once or twice, and he falls. The passers-by laugh.

This scene sits in the opening pages of a book the French philosopher Henri Bergson published in nineteen hundred, Le Rire, or Laughter. Bergson puts the scene down not as an example of a joke but as a riddle. Because there is nothing funny here. The man played no trick on anyone, deceived no one, made no witty remark about himself. He simply fell. And those same people, if they saw that his knee was bleeding, would stop laughing within a second and rush to help. So the ones laughing are not bad people. But they are laughing.

Now look at that pavement from the other side, from the side of the people laughing. They did not decide to laugh. There was no time to decide; the sound came out before any decision. In this respect laughter resembles a sneeze — involuntary, lodged in the body. But here is the strange part: nobody is ashamed of sneezing. Laughter, we are ashamed of. If that man stood up and looked the laughers in the eye, most of them would look away. None of us says, "I sneezed, forgive me," yet all of us know how to say, "sorry, I laughed." So laughter is both a reaction outside our control and a piece of conduct we can be held to account for. The only reflex a human being apologises for.

Modern research has followed the same double nature. The American neuroscientist Robert Provine noted down when people laughed — on the street, in shopping centres, in university corridors — and once he had recorded more than twelve hundred moments of laughter, two things emerged. The first was that a person alone almost never laughs; laughter multiplies many times over when someone else is present. The second, and the more surprising one, was that most of that laughter had not been preceded by any joke at all. The overwhelming majority of the lines that triggered laughter were of this kind: "Where have you been?" "That's what I thought too." "All right, see you." So laughter is not, in the main, an answer given to jokes. It is a signal sprinkled through conversation. A kind of punctuation.

And a signal always has someone it is addressed to. This is exactly where the whole question begins. Laughter has a direction. Language has buried the distinction in its grammar, and we use it every day without noticing: laughing at someone, and laughing with them. The sound is the same. The same muscle tightens, the same breath catches, even the number of decibels in the room is the same. But one of them lays that person out on the table, and the other seats them at it.

You do not need an instrument to measure this, because the person on the receiving end knows instantly. A young newcomer in a meeting mispronounces a foreign word during a presentation and there is a short ripple of giggling in the room. Within half a second you can watch a calculation cross that young person's face: is this aimed at me? If someone at the table then says, "I read that word wrong for years myself," and puts their own mistake on display, the very same giggling becomes shared, the direction flips, and the newcomer relaxes. Nothing, in fact, has been said; only the address of the laughter has changed. The same thing happens at a family dinner. The difference between laughter that gathers around a condition, an accent, a body weight, a failure, and laughter in which everyone is caught by the same absurdity, shows in who gets up from the table with a knot in their chest.

So the question is this: where exactly does that line run? Why is laughter sometimes a gift and sometimes a slap? And who draws the distinction — the one who makes the joke, the one who laughs, or the one who is laughed at?

The first sharp answer the history of philosophy gave to this question is not at all comforting.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his great work Leviathan, published in sixteen fifty-one, and in a text on human nature he had written eleven years earlier, gives laughter a very cold definition: laughter is sudden glory. For Hobbes, what pulls our faces into that odd shape is the sudden recognition of some superiority in ourselves. Either we have just managed something we did not expect to manage, or — far more often — we have spotted in somebody else a flaw, an incapacity, a crookedness, and by comparison with that crookedness we have abruptly applauded ourselves. The laughter on the pavement, by this definition, is not even about the man who fell. It is about the people laughing. For half a second, each of them said to themselves: I am still standing.

Hobbes does not write this as praise. On the contrary, he counts laughter as a sign of weakness. In his view the person of great spirit measures themselves not against other people's deficiencies but against the best; the man who is forever laughing is the man who can only gather his standing by shrinking others. It is worth remembering that the person writing this lived in the middle of a civil war, describing a world in which everyone was appraising everyone else, where rank and respect were renegotiated daily. And it has to be admitted: the definition does not stay locked in a dusty book. A photograph dropped into a workplace group chat, the endless running joke built on somebody's accent, the impression performed in the lift on the way out of a meeting. None of these is quite a joke; each is a ledger of superiority, kept in small entries.

Bergson approaches the same phenomenon from somewhere else entirely, and his conclusion again points downward. For him laughter has a single precondition: the heart must go numb for a moment. You cannot laugh at someone whose pain you feel. The instant any pity enters the scene, comedy collapses. Laughter, then, is the product not of affection but of a brief anaesthesia. And what is it for? Bergson's answer is that laughter is a social gesture, an instrument of correction. Correcting what? Rigidity. His famous formula is the mechanical stuck onto the living. Anything that insists on behaving like a machine where life is asking for flexibility is comic: the official who applies the rule to the letter although the situation has changed, the man still speaking in the sentences he used thirty years ago, the person walking along absent-mindedly who has not noticed that the road has turned. Society notices that rigidity and punishes it. The punishment is not prison; it is a small humiliation. Bergson says so plainly: to correct, laughter has to shame, otherwise it does not work.

Two philosophers, two different centuries, two different worlds. Yet both seem to be saying the same thing: the arrow of laughter points downward. For Hobbes, I am laughing for my own sake. For Bergson, society is laughing, using my mouth to do it. In both, laughter has a victim; in one, fuel for my pride, in the other, the stick of discipline.

The trouble is that both of these answers struggle to explain the most common form laughter takes in life. Because human beings also laugh at themselves. In a conversation where nobody has fallen and nobody has been diminished, two friends can laugh for half an hour until their eyes water. And the funniest people in most of our lives are not the ones who belittle us; they are the ones who include us.

Freud noticed this crack in the account in the book he wrote on jokes in nineteen oh five, and he divided the field in two. On one side are jokes that really do have a target, smuggling hostility or desire past a prohibition and out into the open; this is the territory Hobbes described. On the other side are jokes with no target at all, running purely on the pleasure of language, of sound, of resemblance, of an unexpected connection; in these there is no person being laughed at, and what is laughed at is the play itself.

So the issue is not where laughter comes from. The issue is measure. And to look for measure, we have to go to a tradition of thought that does not condemn laughter but has drawn its boundary.

When Aristotle defines comedy in the Poetics, he adds a very fine qualification. Comedy, he says, shows people as somewhat worse than they are; but the laughable is a particular species of the ugly — a flaw that causes no pain and does no damage. That single sentence carries an entire ethical criterion inside it. The boundary of the comic is pain. The moment a flaw begins to hurt, it leaves comedy and turns into something else. Aristotle is not forbidding laughter here; he is stating laughter's own nature. A joke that wounds is not merely a bad joke; it is no longer a joke.

In the Nicomachean Ethics he carries the same idea up to the level of character. Aristotle's virtues always sit in the middle between two excesses, and wit is one of them. At one extreme stands the buffoon: the person who will say anything for a laugh, who spares no one and nothing, who will sell the person beside them for one burst of laughter. At the other extreme stands the boor, who can neither make a joke nor take one, who meets every witticism with his own solemnity. The person Aristotle praises is in the middle, and their real skill is not making people laugh; it is knowing what not to say. This is a strikingly modern idea. The measure of intelligence is not delivering the joke that occurs to you, but leaving some part of the joke that occurs to you unsaid.

The same criterion is set down in a completely different language by the chapter of the Quran called Al-Hujurat, the Rooms. Its eleventh verse forbids one community from mocking another; it also forbids the giving of insulting nicknames and the finding of fault with one another. What is remarkable here is the reason given. The reason is not that mockery is coarse behaviour. The reason has to do with knowledge: perhaps they are better than you. In other words, the person mocking is making use of information they do not actually possess. They are drawing up a ranking and placing themselves at the top, when they have no instrument whatever for verifying that ranking. What Hobbes called sudden glory is here diagnosed precisely and rejected: a verdict without evidence, hidden inside a laugh. The next verse of the same chapter places talking behind people's backs in the same family, because both run on the same fuel — the reputation of someone who is not in the room.

One of those who worked this line out in the greatest detail was al-Ghazali. This thinker, who lived in the eleventh century, listed the afflictions of the tongue one by one in his great work Ihya Ulum al-Din, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, and he put humour on that list too. But where he put it matters: he does not forbid humour itself, because he cannot. The sources contain accounts of the Prophet joking, and al-Ghazali knows them. A small boy's bird has died, and he teases him: "O Abu Umayr, what has the little bird done?" To a man who asks for a mount he says, "I shall put you on the offspring of a she-camel"; when the man objects in confusion, he reminds him that every camel is the offspring of a she-camel. The point al-Ghazali underlines is this: in none of these jokes is there a falsehood, and in none of them is the dignity of the person addressed paid out as the price. The child is not made small, the man is not made small; both of them are partners in the joke rather than its audience.

Al-Ghazali's warning runs in two directions. The first concerns habit: joking that becomes constant erodes a person's capacity for seriousness, and after a while you find yourself unable to carry anything. The second, and the sharper one, concerns mockery. When al-Ghazali describes mockery he puts technique at the centre of the definition: imitating someone's words, their condition, their walk or their shortcoming so that others will laugh, and doing it in a way that makes that person smaller. Here the laughter is not a by-product; the target's shame is the fuel itself.

And so the line we were looking for runs right through here, and it is less blurred than people assume. Wit looks at a situation; mockery looks at a person. Wit takes aim at the contradiction, the oddity, at language itself; mockery takes aim at the person who cannot get out of that contradiction. In everyday life you can test it with three questions. Is the person being spoken about here? If they were here, could they join in this laughter? And most importantly: who is paying for this laughter? If everyone leaves the table lighter, it was wit. If one person leaves heavier, it goes by another name.

One further caution is needed, because this is where we go wrong most often. The person being laughed at very often laughs too. But that laughter is not always consent; sometimes it is simply a survival tactic. The weakest person in the room learns to join in the laughter that is mocking them, because not joining in means admitting you are the target. This is why the sentence "look, even they're laughing" proves nothing at all. To know whether a laugh is voluntary or compulsory, you have to look at how power is distributed in that room.

And the moment we start talking about power, the story takes on an entirely different dimension.

Because throughout history the people most afraid of jokes have not been the ordinary people being laughed at; they have been the ones sitting on thrones.

Nasreddin Hodja lived in the thirteenth century; by tradition he died in Akşehir, and the date on his gravestone corresponds to the year twelve eighty-four. Timur was born in thirteen thirty-six. Which means the Hodja died more than half a century before the ruler he sits across from and trades lines with in the stories was even born. This is not an error; it is a need. The people added those stories later, because they needed a man who would not drop his gaze in front of the most feared figure of the age, and who answered him with wit rather than a sword. That is how Nasreddin stopped being a person and became a method. And the finest detail of that method is this: in most of the stories the Hodja is talking about his own stinginess, his own laziness, his own cunning. He earns the right to mock the sultan by mocking himself first. The mirror he turns upward, he has first held to his own face.

This permission has had its institutional forms as well. On the Karagöz shadow screen, from the sixteenth century onward according to tradition, the men of the state, the tricks of the tradesmen, the hypocrisy of the neighbourhood were openly imitated — but the one doing the imitating was not a human being; it was the shadow of a piece of leather. The screen granted both the licence to speak and the right to escape responsibility. There is an older case too: the Roman historian Suetonius reports that at Caesar's triumph the soldiers sang songs mocking their own commander, and even shouted coarse verses advising the public to hide their wives. The empire allowed itself to be mocked on one day of the year, because it sensed that allowing nothing at all would cost more.

What happens when the permission narrows is shown by newspaper archives. In the Ottoman world the first great address of humour was Diyojen, meaning Diogenes, brought out by Teodor Kasap in eighteen seventy. In its short life the magazine was shut down repeatedly, and in eighteen seventy-three it was silenced altogether. Kasap started new magazines, and in eighteen seventy-seven a cartoon published in one called Hayal, meaning Fantasy, became famous: Karagöz stands there in chains, and when asked whether the press is free, his answer is that liberty is free within the frame of the constitution, the Kanun-ı Esasi. One sentence. The penalty handed down for it was, according to the sources, three years in prison. A drawing of a chain and a joke ten words long had obliged a state to convene a court.

There are darker examples. In nineteen thirty-four Nazi Germany brought in the regulation later known as the Malicious Practices Act, and jokes told about the regime became a formal matter for prosecution. In one of the cases tried under these laws, a priest named Josef Müller was prosecuted over a single joke he had told about a dying soldier, and he was executed in nineteen forty-four. When a state kills someone over a joke, it is announcing its own conviction about the power of jokes in the clearest possible terms.

So where does this fear come from? The answer lies in the fuel that power runs on. Power moves by way of seriousness. Against criticism it has instruments: it can produce a counter-argument, publish documents, punish if need be. But laughter does not argue. Laughter does not refute the other side's claim; it drains the claim of its weight. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle passes on a tactic attributed to Gorgias: break your opponent's seriousness with laughter, and their laughter with seriousness. Why this works is plain. A power that has lost its seriousness still has force in its hands, but obedience is gone; it goes on being feared, and it is not respected.

Today the same mechanism is cheaper and faster than it has ever been in its history. Making a meme requires no printing press, no licence, no capital, no distribution network; a phone is enough, and an image reaches, in half a day, places no editorial column could ever get to. In the history of laughter that looks upward, this is an expansion. But the same cheapness has also made it easier to reverse the arrow. A few seconds of a stranger having a bad day in the street are recorded and dropped onto millions of screens, and not one of those millions knows that person's name, their story, what happened to them that day. What Bergson set down as the precondition of laughter, the heart going numb for a moment, is now supplied automatically: the screen distributes that numbness free of charge. The people who saw the man fall on the pavement could at least see his bleeding knee. On the far side of a screen there is no such possibility.

This is why the answer to the question we began with does not lie, as people assume, in the content of the joke. You cannot say with certainty, by looking at the words of a sentence, whether it is wit or mockery. The answer lies in how freedom is distributed around that laughter. What happens in a room where laughing is compulsory is not humour; it is a salute. What happens in a room where staying silent is permitted is humour, because there the laugh is saying something.

And perhaps the soundest criterion is this: does the person being laughed at have the right to reply? Mockery is built on leaving the other person mute; the target's only options are to keep quiet or to be the one who spoils the fun. Wit always leaves the other person a move to make. Nasreddin Hodja's real genius was not that he humiliated the sultan; it was that he always left the sultan an answer he could give. At the dinner table, in the classroom, at work, on a screen, this is the quickest way to tell which side we are on. After the laughter, is there a silence, or is a conversation beginning?

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