“Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.”
–Henri Bergson

Last weekend, here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a man named Paul Bechtoldt was charged after threatening to “shoot up” a No Kings protest in Scranton. When confronted, his defense was a familiar one: he was, he claimed, “just joking.”

This is a defense we hear quite a bit (and one I’ve written about before), from schoolyards to online forums to, most notoriously, the political arena. Oftentimes people try to use this phrase as a get-out-of-jail-free card played after a statement causes real alarm. But we should always ask ourselves: what separates a genuine, if failed, joke from a statement that can never be funny? For one answer, we can turn to a century-old theory from French philosopher Henri Bergson, who has definitely spent some time thinking about why we laugh. Bergson’s essay on laughter reveals that “just joking” in cases like this isn’t just a weak excuse—it’s a complete category error.

Bergson argued that laughter has no greater foe than emotion. For a thing to be funny, he suggested, our hearts must be momentarily anesthetized; I refer to this process as a narrowing of our scope of concern that allows us to temporarily not give a shit about someone, a group of someones, or something. In other words, in order to laugh we must view the situation with cold, intellectual clarity. Think of the classic slapstick bit: a man slips on a banana peel. We laugh only for as long as we are certain he isn’t genuinely hurt. The second we see a wince of pain empathy kicks in and the laughter dies in our throats. At least this is definitely the case for me. Comedy indeed requires a temporary suspension of our concern and is nothing if not social. Because of the social nature of comedy jokes can very easily serve a function of normalizing unacceptable things by signaling to people who agree with us that, yes, this is an okay thing to talk about.

To apply our Bergsonian logic to the joke/threat that Paul Bechtoldt made we can restate it this way: it’s fine to narrow our scope of concern to exclude No Kings protesters and laugh about the idea of them being shot to death. Obviously Bechtoldt didn’t read the room very well (he made this threat in a post office apparently) because his audience simply refused to narrow their scopes of concern in order to laugh at his death-threat joke. This is most likely because a threat of mass violence is engineered to do the exact opposite of what a real joke does. A threat is designed to trigger the most primal human emotions: fear, terror, and a profound concern for safety. To expect the audience of such a threat to achieve the “anesthesia of the heart” necessary to find it funny is philosophically absurd. The emotion Bechtoldt’s words were meant to elicit is the very thing that kills the comedy stone dead (pardon the pun).

This is why calling a violent threat a “joke” is a pernicious category error. It tries to place an act of intimidation into a philosophical box whose rules it immediately violates. True laughter can’t be weaponized because it’s the opposite of a weapon. It’s the momentary, shared relief of not being under threat, it is an expression of safety—it’s being tickled by your loved one because you know they would never hurt you; it’s the brief, collective exhale when we realize the man who slipped isn’t hurt after all. Honestly, the best comedy makes us feel safe and allows us to know that for a single, weightless second, we can stop giving so many shits. May it be so.

Tags:Bergsonjust jokinglaughternonviolenceviolence