Comedy is dying all over the West. It seems like it’s now impossible to make a joke about anything without getting cancelled, banned from everything and one’s life destroyed. A parade of comedians have been cancelled in recent years, and now an atmosphere of sombre dread hangs over every country. But this dark turn of events can be easily explained, as this essay will show.
All totalitarian regimes strongly discourage humour. The Christians of the authoritarian right killed people for it, the Nazis of the authoritarian centre killed people for it and the Commies of the authoritarian left killed people for it. If the essence of libertarianism is light-hearted levity, the essence of authoritarianism is taking everything extremely seriously – or being made to.
Humour is chaos. By its very nature, it’s unpredictable. No-one has ever been able to write an accurate guide to reliably producing humour, because humour has to be unexpected in order to be funny. Because humour is chaotic and unpredictable, it works like a dissolving acid against stale, stagnant and superfluous ideas and political structures.
It’s this chaotic effect that causes totalitarians to seethe about it.
Totalitarianism is, in its metaphysical essence, an excess of order. It’s when the finest details of every person’s life have been determined by someone above them on the dominance hierarchy. Totalitarianism is ultimately borne by fear: the more afraid an individual or a population is, the more they want a Big Daddy to come in and set everything right. Fear leads to the desire for the imposition of order.
In order for totalitarianism to be possible, the masses have to be conditioned to accept it. But they can’t be conditioned into sanely accepting it, because a sane person, not being afraid, will not accept submission to totalitarians. As such, the masses have to be made to insanely accept it – they have to be driven mad by relentless propaganda so that they throw themselves into the arms of those who would rule them.
The totalitarians seize power by deliberately creating mass psychosis. This is a form of hypnosis, whereby the masses are hypnotised into following the will of their rulers. This is achieved by overloading the minds of the masses so that they don’t have enough mental bandwidth to process all the stimulation coming in. A mind overloaded by stimuli is less able to resist suggestion. So the totalitarians overwhelm the resistance of their subjects by blasting them with ceaseless fear-producing propaganda.
Humour counters this by clearing the mental slate from overstimulation.
As such, humour breaks down the conditioning effect of mass psychosis, and thereby liberates people from the grip that totalitarians have on their minds. Totalitarianism preys on fear, in particular the fear that induces people to keep their heads down in case they get punished, and humour dispells this fear, instead inducing people to stand up straight and to defy those who would rule them.
The reason why Marxist Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt took to the mainstream media to have VJM Publishing cancelled for selling ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ t-shirts is precisely because they were humourous. Authoritarian leftists like Hunt consider their ideology to be Very Serious Business. As such, plebs like VJM Publishing are not allowed to make fun of it. Despite being clearly satirical, the slogan was declared to be “white supremacist” and the t-shirts pulled.
The Quadrijitu informs us that these things go in cycles. When life is good, people roll over for totalitarian measures because they’ve got too much to lose by rocking the boat. When life is bad, people keep their heads down. But when things get really bad, and people no longer have anything to lose, anger arises, and this anger leads people to take action despite the threat of consequences.
This current wave of totalitarianism will only end when a new generation of fearless comedians stands up and takes the piss again. VJM Publishing made an effort to mock the direction the Western World was headed with our book Clown World Chronicles – our most successful book in ten years of operations. We haven’t been cancelled for it (so far), and this is what the world needs more of – people standing up.
Humour doesn’t have to be good to serve as the antidote to totalitarianism. It doesn’t have to be intelligent, tasteful or even funny. The most important thing is that it is irreverent. This irreverence breaks the spell of the mass hypnosis and stops people from seeing totalitarians as authority figures. So if you want to do something about the totalitarian direction the West is moving in – take the piss out of an authority figure.
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