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Racial Identity, Laughter, and Politics
Political theorist Patrick Giamario discusses how laughter functions politically during Nusbaum Center event
University News | September 24, 2024
Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, Dr. Patrick Giamario, was welcomed to campus as a guest lecturer to share his research and insights with the VWU campus community, provoking thought and discussion. Giamario presented his work during a Robert Nusbaum Center-sponsored event in Brock Commons on September 24.
His presentation, “Laffin’ Kamala, Racial Identity, Laughter, and Politics,” revealed that what initially seemed like a derisive, stilted nickname that Donald Trump has publicly assigned to Kamala Harris during current presidential campaigning, actually reflects on how the laughter of Black Americans has long been associated with intense white anxiety, police intervention, and democratic resistance.
Giamario referenced the work of American writer, literary critic, and scholar Ralph Ellison in his 1985 essay “An Extravagance of Laughter.” The essay explores how the distinctive sounds, styles, and tonalities of Black laughter are products of a history of racial oppression and how white supremacy sustains itself by treating these differences in laughter as evidence of essential racial difference.
What does Ellison’s work teach us about the politics of the “Laffin’ Kamala” nickname?
“Ellison shows us that this nickname cannot and should not be dismissed as a one-off attack line or petty name calling,” notes Giamario. “‘Laffin Kamala’ did not come out of nowhere. When Trump characterizes Harris’ laughter as both ‘the laugh of a crazy person or a lunatic,’ he is tapping into and extending into a long tradition of both hearing the laughter of Black Americans as irrational and dangerous, and is seeking ways to regulate that laughter in ways that only intensifies the stigma attached to it and to its subjects.”
Giamario argues that Americans ought to take the ‘Laughin Kamala’ nickname very seriously.
“It is an attack whose roots extend deep into the folkways through which Americans make sense of their history and their identity as Americans. It has many possible entry points into the political consciousness of citizens today. The effects of ‘Laffin Kamala’ on political attitudes and on voting behavior, thus, should not be underestimated.”
More on this topic is available in Giamario’s first book, “Laughter as Politics: Critical Theory in an Age of Hilarity,” published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022.
Learn more about the Robert Nusbaum Center at VWU.