Immanuel Kant offers a surprisingly Nietzschean account of laughter in §54 of the Critique of Judgment. The discovery of innocence and simplicity where one expected to find a ‘beautiful, but false illusion’ ignites a pleasurable discordance within and between the mind's faculties and the body's organs through which ‘the rogue within ourselves is exposed’. Laughter lays bare a previously hidden side of the subject – a roguish side refreshingly naive of the Kantian distinctions between the imagination, reason and the understanding; judgement and affect; duty and inclination. While Kant worries about the threat this rogue poses to the subject's rational and moral vocation (202–3), he also illuminates laughter as an experience that ‘makes reason think more’ (183; Giamario 2017) or that prompts reason to freely revise its ideas in response to the contingencies of empirical existence. In the playful, roguish self-transcendence sparked by laughter, the Kantian subject becomes, for a moment at least, a kind of Nietzschean free spirit.

Recent developments in gelopolitics suggest we ought to consider a darker and more troubling interpretation of Kant's account, however. The rise in reactionary deployments of laughter – for example, the emergence of insult comedy as presidential speech (Webber 2019b; Wolcott 2015); Internet trolling as political discourse (Forestal 2017; Greene 2019; Lieback 2019); ‘owning the libs’ as a policymaking principle (Perticone 2018; Scocca 2019); ‘parodic’ celebrations of violence against journalists (Harwell and Romm 2019);