When power becomes a joke

Political power likes to be taken seriously.

It needs ceremony, authority, carefully constructed images and a certain distance between those who govern and those who are governed. The greater that distance, the harder it becomes for ordinary citizens to question power. Yet there is one thing power has always found difficult to control: laughter.

A joke can cross a barrier that an argument cannot. A meme can travel where a speech cannot. Ridicule can puncture an aura of invincibility without firing a shot. This is why satire matters in politics. It may not bring governments down, but it can do something important before that happens: it can make people less afraid.

As Thomas More observed, “The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.” The observation is centuries old, but its relevance has hardly diminished. The question is not whether laughter alone can overthrow a political order. History offers little evidence for that. The more interesting question is whether political power can retain its psychological authority once citizens begin laughing at the very symbols they were once expected to revere.

The Joke Beneath the Silence

Political humour is hardly a new invention.

James C. Scott's idea of the hidden transcript helps explain why. Where direct criticism is dangerous, dissent often finds indirect forms: jokes, rumours, coded language, double meanings and private conversations. What cannot safely be shouted can still be whispered—and sometimes whispered everywhere.

George Orwell captured the subversive quality of humour rather neatly: “There are things that can only be said in the form of a joke... Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the carnivalesque takes the argument further. Carnival temporarily turns hierarchy upside down. The king can be mocked. The powerful can become ridiculous. The untouchable can be made human.

The hierarchy may return when the carnival ends. But something has changed. The person who has laughed at power may find it harder to fear power in quite the same way again.

The digital age has given this old instinct an entirely new velocity.

The essay calls this algorithmic anekdoty: the political joke travelling through networks at extraordinary speed, acquiring new meanings as it moves, understood instantly by insiders and sometimes almost invisibly by outsiders. Unlike the old political joke passed from mouth to mouth, the digital joke can reach millions before authority has even worked out what is being mocked. It is both public and private. Everyone can see it. Not everyone can decode it.

That makes it particularly difficult to police.

From the Soviet Whisper to the Digital Meme

The history of political humour offers useful precedents.

In the Soviet Union, political jokes became a parallel language of dissent. They mocked shortages, bureaucratic absurdities and the contradictions between official propaganda and everyday experience. The jokes did not bring down the Soviet system. Economic stagnation, political fragmentation, nationalism and other forces played far greater roles.

But humour helped create something important: a psychological distance between citizens and the official version of reality.

In Czechoslovakia, satire, absurdist theatre and irreverent public expression similarly helped undermine the solemnity of a Soviet-backed political order. When people could laugh at the symbols of authority, authority became slightly less frightening.

As one oft-attributed observation from Yevgeny Zamyatin puts it, “Our regime is built on fear, and fear cannot tolerate a smile.” The thought captures the larger historical lesson.

The lesson is not that jokes cause revolutions. It is that revolutions become easier to imagine when fear begins to lose its monopoly.

India Discovers the Politics of the Meme

That old dynamic has acquired a distinctly Indian form.

India's younger digital generation inhabits a political culture very different from that of its parents. For many young Indians, politics is encountered not only through newspapers, television debates or political speeches, but through Instagram, YouTube, memes, short videos and increasingly sophisticated forms of digital irony.

Economic anxiety, unemployment, examination controversies and frustration with institutions have increasingly found expression through humour and ridicule.

The significance is not merely that young people are making jokes about politicians. It is that the joke can reverse the direction of political communication.

A leader addresses the young. The young turn the address into a meme.

An official statement is issued. The statement becomes parody.

A crackdown is announced. The crackdown becomes content.

The machinery of authority begins producing the material of its own ridicule.

That is the peculiar power of digital satire.

The same phenomenon can be seen when an insult intended to humiliate protesters is appropriated by those protesters themselves. Instead of accepting the label as degradation, they turn it into identity, humour and collective defiance. The insult loses some of its sting precisely because its targets refuse to remain its victims.

There is something profoundly democratic in that reversal.

When Ridicule Leaves the Screen

The more interesting question is what happens when digital mockery moves into the physical world.

The NALSAR and Bar Council controversy provides such a case. Law students' protest over the proposed presence of Chief Justice at a convocation reportedly developed into a wider confrontation involving the Bar Council of India and, subsequently, the Supreme Court. The episode demonstrated how quickly an institutional attempt at damage control could itself become the subject of public criticism and ridicule.

Institutions depend not only on legal authority but also on credibility.

Once an institution begins looking absurd, defensive or politically compromised, its formal powers may remain intact while its moral authority begins to leak away.

Ridicule is particularly dangerous to institutions that depend upon being regarded as solemn, neutral and beyond ordinary political contest.

Laughter Has Limits

There is, however, a danger in romanticising the politics of laughter.

A meme is not a movement. A viral hashtag is not an organisation. Collective amusement is not the same thing as collective political action.

Digital satire can create an intoxicating sense of participation while leaving institutions untouched. It can become a pressure valve, allowing anger to be released without ever becoming organised pressure for change.

There is another danger: co-option.

Governments and political movements have learnt to speak the language of memes themselves. Influencers, friendly digital accounts and carefully produced humorous content can turn the aesthetics of rebellion into another form of propaganda.

The same platforms that amplify dissent can amplify counter-dissent. They can also suppress it. Content can be reported, accounts suspended and algorithms manipulated. What looks like a free digital carnival may, in reality, be a contested space in which citizens, political organisations, platforms and governments compete for attention.

There is a deeper limitation too. The digital revolution is not equally available to everyone. Rural citizens, older generations and those without reliable internet access may remain outside these conversations. A meme that feels politically explosive in an urban digital community may barely register elsewhere.

Satire, therefore, cannot substitute for politics. At its strongest, it works alongside politics.

The Global Joke

India is hardly alone.

From the Philippines to Hong Kong, Belarus and Turkey, political humour has become a recurring language of digital resistance. Protesters use memes, cartoons, stickers and parody not simply to entertain themselves but to preserve morale, build solidarity and deny authoritarian power the solemnity it seeks.

But these examples also provide a warning.

Humour did not prevent repression in Hong Kong. It did not dislodge Duterte. It did not bring down Lukashenko. Satirists in Turkey have faced censorship and prosecution.

The joke can expose power. It cannot necessarily defeat it.

That depends on independent institutions, civil society, political organisation and the capacity to turn public sentiment into sustained pressure.

When the Crackdown Becomes the Joke

There is nevertheless something modern political establishments have begun to discover.

Trying too hard to suppress ridicule can make it travel further.

The attempted removal of a joke can become a bigger story than the joke itself. A warning can become a meme. A takedown can produce a hundred reposts. A furious response can tell millions of people what they should be looking for.

The attempted suppression becomes the advertisement.

This is the digital version of the Streisand effect (the phenomenon in which an attempt to hide, suppress or remove information draws greater public attention to it, causing it to spread even further).

And it creates an awkward dilemma for political power. Ignore the joke and it may spread. Attack it and the attack may spread faster.

The problem becomes particularly acute when a generation no longer sees political leaders primarily through official images and carefully managed television appearances. It sees them through the camera in its own hand.

That changes the relationship.

When Fear Begins to Laugh

Perhaps the most important achievement of satire is not that it humiliates power.

It is that it humanises power. The mighty become ordinary. The untouchable becomes mockable. The intimidating becomes ridiculous.

And once citizens discover that they can laugh at something they were taught to fear, the psychological equation changes.

Not completely. Not permanently. And certainly not everywhere.

But enough to matter.

Political authority rests partly on laws, institutions, money and coercion. It also rests on perception. People obey not merely because they must, but because they believe power is powerful.

Satire attacks that belief.

It says: look again.

Perhaps the emperor is not as formidable as he appears. Perhaps the institution is not as untouchable. Perhaps the leader is not infallible. Perhaps the joke is allowed.

That is why political systems built around reverence have historically been uncomfortable with humour. A serious argument can be censored. A newspaper can be closed. A speaker can be silenced.

But a joke has a strange ability to survive its executioner.

It can be remembered. Retold. Rewritten. And laughed at again.

The great lesson of political satire, therefore, is not that laughter will topple power.

It is more subtle—and perhaps more important.

Laughter opens the door; politics must walk through it.

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(Author: kgsharma1@gmail.com; The writer is a retired officer of the Indian Information Service and a freelance writer. Also worked as an international media consultant with UNICEF Nigeria and contributes regularly to various publications.)