The weird and sexist criticism of Kamala’s “cackle”: Decoding how Harris got the last laugh

Imagine how much you would have to hate life to castigate someone for laughing. It is important to dwell on the thought experiment before considering political ideology or feminist theory because the inevitable revelation produces profound political and cultural clarity.

Everyone has faced the challenge of navigating a conversation with a humorless scold. There is the teacher who punishes innocuous jokes; the minister of the variety depicted in the underrated film “Chocolat,” whose primary devotion is the prohibition of pleasure. and the socially maladjusted relative who struggles to form a smile at birthday celebrations, in holiday photos, or during joyous ceremonies, like weddings or baptisms. These are people who those in close proximity do all they can to avoid. If a coworker or kin finds herself cornered in a dour discussion with the malcontent, she will activate the most creative parts of her mind to engineer an excuse to exit the encounter.

As sad as the permanently morose seem, they do not even ridicule those who laugh, but those who find joy in their lives. They resign themselves to sitting at the end of the table, or standing in the background, looking pitiful for reasons no one can identify, usually provoking more sympathy than contempt.

Misanthropy is now central to the American right, meaning that one of the most important, but incalculable elements of the presidential race is the weird factor. Having already exposed themselves as irredeemably weird (not to mention sexist), with Trump's running mate Sen. JD Vance’s derision of “childless cat ladies,” the Republican Party will only get more bizarre and only appear more estranged from American culture. One of the biggest triggers for their weird outbursts is laughter from Kamala Harris.

The leaders of the Republican Party, and their propagandists in right-wing media, are miserable to the extent that they have mocked and derided— for years —Harris because she is fond of laughing. While the typical person observes Harris’ effervescent guffaw, and thinks, “She seems fun!”, the contemporary right winger, so filled with darkness, objects. “How dare she enjoy life…”

The attacks on her laugh date back to 2020 when Joe Biden named her as his running mate. As the New York Times reported, “There was a time, early in her vice presidency, when Kamala Harris, aware of reams of conservative news coverage criticizing her laughter, privately wondered to confidants whether she should laugh, or show a sense of humor, at all.”

Lately, they’ve only increased. TV advertisements for Trump’s campaign zero in on the laugh, showing Harris’ face light up into a wide smile from different angles, often in slow motion, as if amusement is a crime. Trump himself has taken to calling the vice president, “Laughin’ Kamala.” During some speeches, he will refer to her as “Lyin’ Kamala.” Both nicknames land well with the audience, demonstrating that to Donald Trump, and his most fervent supporters, accusations of good humor and dishonesty are equally damaging.

The Republican Party tweeted, from one of its official accounts, that “Kamala Harris brought her cackle to Milwaukee,” with a short clip of the Democratic nominee for president laughing in the middle of her remarks to an exuberant swing state audience.

Sean Hannity has even suggested that “American enemies,” like Russia and China, would not take a President Kamala Harris seriously, because she laughs (!).

During an April appearance on the “Drew Barrymore Show,” Harris said the following in response to attacks on her displays of joviality: “I have my mother’s laugh. I grew up around a bunch of women who laughed from the gut. They would sit around the kitchen, telling big stories with big laughs. I think it is important to remind each other, and our younger ones, don’t be confined to other people’s perception about how you should act…”

It is tempting to allow Harris’ words to close the conversation on her laughter. The Republican Party has become joyless, and Harris is emblematic of joy. It is a stark contrast.

However, the reasons for opposition to the vice president’s laughter cut deep.

Niobe Way, a professor of developmental psychology, often explains that American society has “privileged the hard over the soft,” referring to hard and soft characteristics of humanity. She gives the following examples: Stoicism over vulnerability, cognition over emotion, autonomy over connectedness, and money over people. In her new book, Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture, Way warns that America’s retrograde, and often reactionary, assumption that men possess only hard qualities, and women possess only soft qualities, hurts both girls and boys, because all human beings are a combination.

She also writes that Americans, often subconsciously, associate “hard” characteristics with leadership, placing hurdles that women must overcome to win statewide and national elections. Donald Trump’s model of leadership, Way argues, “is all hard and dismissive of the soft.”

When Kamala Harris laughs with riotous zeal, while occupying a position of leadership, she challenges the hard over soft hierarchy. Her laugh communicates that expression of emotion while making difficult decisions is not only possible but perhaps, commendable. The image of a laughing woman in a role of power is tough to tolerate if you believe that executive leadership demands a steely, inhuman, statue-like laconicism.

A keyword in the above sentence is “woman.” Hatred of Kamala Harris’ laughter demonstrates a vexing contradiction of challenges for women, the types of which America Ferrera articulates in her viral monologue from the film, “Barbie.” If women don’t display feeling, they have “resting bitch face,” which means they are coldhearted. Slanders of this variety were a right-wing favorite against Hillary Clinton, who also faced criticisms of being “shrill.” If they laugh, like Kamala Harris, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping won’t take them seriously. In the words of adjudicated sex offender, Donald Trump, the Kamala Harris laugh proves that she is “crazy.”

If one’s idea of normal human behavior resembles the King’s Guard outside Buckingham Palace, Kamala Harris might come off as crazy. As absurd as that line of thought sounds, it is, tragically, common among many Americans, especially those with a conservative mindset.

Avrum Weiss, a psychotherapist, summarizes the vast body of research on the emotional dynamics separating the average woman from the average man with the following: “Men often get uncomfortable when women have strong feelings. This is particularly true when women are upset, but men can also feel uncomfortable when women are excited, full of joy, or even really turned on. Women understand this and learned long ago to suppress their own excitement in order not to make men uncomfortable.”

“In our culture,” Weiss adds, “men are taught not to feel.”

Kamala Harris does not “suppress her own excitement,” and as a consequence, makes many men uncomfortable. Men, contrarily, do not suffer under any expectation to suppress emotion, as long as that emotion is anger. Hillary Clinton, the last woman nominee for president, faced off against Bernie Sanders in the primary, and Donald Trump in the general election – two men whose preferred means of communication is screaming to the point of their faces turning red. The imagination of Greta Gerwig is not necessary to consider how the press, not to mention Republicans, would have reacted if Clinton bellowed like Sanders, or how they will react if Harris ever blusters, turning her cheeks the shade of a hideous red baseball cap, like Trump.

Hillary Clinton had no choice but to navigate the complexities of sexism during her presidential campaign, and Harris will have the same arduous task. Things become more complicated for Harris because she is Black and Asian. On a census form, she checks three boxes of persecuted Americans. She belongs to three demographic categories who have endured, to varying degrees, oppression, exclusion, and predatory discrimination.

Ralph Ellison described the conditions of Black Americans under the state-sponsored terrorism of Jim Crow as a choice between “living with music and dying with noise.” One of the writers most influenced by Ellison, Albert Murray, wrote in his classic treatise on blues and jazz, “Stomping the Blues,” that the musical performance, and the exhilaration it creates in the audience, gives the dispossessed the opportunity to beat their blues into the ground. Dancing, in that context, is not only a physical release but a means of emotional relief.

With what could act as advice for Kamala Harris who is already facing attacks on her personality and dating history, Murray wrote, “Where there is bare-faced mockery the depth of the resistance goes without saying. And the same holds true in the case of malediction, or bad-mouthing, which in addition to loudmouthing, or damnation by diatribe and vilification also includes insinuation and scandalous innuendo. The main thing, whatever the form, is resistance if not hostility. Because the whole point is not to give in and let them get you down.”

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If Kamala Harris continues to display high spirits, she will show that the right-wing weirdos have not gotten her down, reaching back to a tradition of subversive joy that has always sustained oppressed people. Evidence of enjoyment of life directly rebuts the central proposition of the oppressor – namely, that the oppressed is inferior.

It will also create a helpful juxtaposition for 2024 voters. The dreariness of the Trump versus Biden choice no longer hangs over society like a raincloud. Harris has injected vitality into a previously stale race, and her personality is the perfect complement to her influence over presidential politics. Her running mate, Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, complements Harris’ infectious enthusiasm, bringing his own gregarious energy to the campaign. During his first speech at the vice president’s side, he praised her “joyousness” as a leader, and told the audience, “don’t underestimate the power of that.”

In an essay in which he imagined Ernest Hemingway running for president, Norman Mailer wrote, “The American people tend to vote for the candidate who gives off the impression of having experienced some pleasure in his life.” It sounds silly, but the Mailer rule is accurate at an astounding rate. It is difficult to think of any exception to the Mailer rule not named, “Richard Nixon.” Karl Rove, chief strategist for the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004, reimagined the Mailer rule when he claimed, during private conversations with Bush, that voters would select the candidate that “they want to have a beer with.”

Videos and memes, promoting Kamala Harris’ laughter, dance moves, and delightful verbal eccentricities, like the now beloved quote from her mother, complete with accompanying laughter, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” have already lit the internet afire.

Pop star, Charli XCX, declared Kamala Harris “brat,” a term of endearment for a woman who is “a little messy” but authentic and energetic.

Kamala Harris appears to take great pleasure in life, enabling her to pass the Mailer test and meet the Rove standard. Millions and millions of Americans, especially women and young voters, would much rather sit down with Harris than Trump. A drink with Trump is, undoubtedly, a dark and dreadful affair – likely full of painful moments with the former president boasting about imaginary achievements, insulting immigrants, and looping from one macabre topic to the next. Sit JD Vance down at the table, and the average diner would probably ask the bartender for a shot of cyanide.

The problem with the Mailer and Rove rule is that it is superficial, and can often encourage voters to make shallow choices. But in the case of Trump versus Harris, the superficial difference speaks to the election’s profound substantive decision.

Donald Trump and JD Vance are American fascists. Fascism is not only joyless but actively committed to the demolition of joy. Footage from any fascistic society underscores how sad, regimented, and dull the fascist envisions life. Uniformed men marching in lockstep while the leader, whether Benito Mussolini or Donald Trump’s friends, Vladimir Putin or King Jong Un, scowls overhead. There is no appreciation for literature, music, or visual art that does not serve a narrow, repressive agenda, and the masses confuse conformity with strength.

Democracy, like Charli XCX’s brats, is messy. It is even, at times, inefficient. But it shields and advances freedom, and freedom enables creativity, authenticity, and joy. It is messy by design, with its three branches of government, checks and balances on unrestrained power, which Trump seeks to destroy, and various levels of governance, from the school board to the White House. But it is also ambitious, unpredictable, forward looking and moving, and as the vice presidency of a woman with a Jamaican father and Indian mother demonstrates, capable of profound self-correction.

A smiling, accomplished biracial woman not only makes for a perfect symbol of the joyous mission of multiracial democracy, especially given that she has assumed the role of saving democracy. Her foil is a sour-faced criminal whining about how everything is “rigged” against him.

Kamala Harris, and the believers in America’s experiment of self-governance who she now represents, may indeed have the last laugh.