The Joke as Protest Tactic, From Athenian Comedy to a Giraffe Suit

Among the images that travel furthest from recent mass protests in the United States, the least solemn ones do the work: demonstrators in inflatable frog costumes, and Robby Roadsteamer singing anti-MAGA songs dressed as a giraffe. The comedy reads as relief. It functions as tactic.

Satire as political resistance is older than the republic being protested. Athenian comic poets were helping steer public opinion in the sixth century BC. Medieval carnivals ridiculed rulers who could not suppress them. Political cartoons carried real weight the last time Americans decided they did not want a monarch. The line runs from Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain to the late-night hosts working the same territory now.

What a costume does that outrage cannot is expose the contrast. Trumpism organizes around division and the scapegoating of “others.” A shared joke organizes around a shared recognition of ordinary human behavior. Scholar John Morreall frames laughter as a social corrective that pulls wrongdoers back into line, and argues that people with