One thing you often hear said about Vice President Kamala Harris is that she has a terrible laugh. Indeed, if you believe its critics, you’d think her laugh is a big reason why she was such a poor candidate for her party’s presidential nomination four years ago, and partly why so many people think she’d make a poor replacement for her failing boss. Harris is “unlikeable”, and one big reason is her cacophonous laugh. Donald Trump, likes to call her “laughing Kamala”. Of course he does.
On the one hand, I generally hate the sort of political chatter that focuses on things like a candidate’s laugh. It’s one of the ways in which we in America accept forms of shallowness and meaninglessness in our politics that are so forthright as to be nihilistic. I mean, according to both game theory and the philosophy of language, people are supposed to hide their strategic intent when they use false speech to manipulate others.
But in American politics we’ve made strategic falseness an open part of our electoral dynamics. “You know, he did a good job of ‘pivoting’ from the primaries where he said the one thing to the general election when he’s saying the totally opposite thing. That was a good pivot. He’s doing well.” When hypocrisy is this overt, vice is no longer — as the saying goes — paying tribute to virtue. Instead it’s waving dismissively at virtue and telling it: “Get lost, old man.” And nobody could possibly believe that someone’s fitness to govern hinges in any way on what their laugh sounds like. But, because the laugh might have some negative subconscious effects on some voters, we grant it real political meaning and carry on vetting candidates for the most powerful political office in the world until we’ve found someone with a better laugh. The shallowness of this is so stark that it borders on self-contradiction.
On the other hand, it’s a pretty bad laugh. It comes at you hard and weird. The cringe you feel when you hear it makes you think: “Something is not working here. Something is off.” The discomfort the laugh induces in the listener, I think, reflects a corresponding discomfort in the laugher, a nagging and unfixable mismatch between her inner nature and the public role she’s playing. The discordant notes in the laugh, in other words, are neurotic, they’re symptomatic, and, I have to admit, I have a soft spot for people whose inner selves burst out in compromising, vaguely neurotic ways, in public.
For example, along with my profound admiration for his footballing skills, I have strangely tender personal feelings toward Uruguay striker and former Liverpool ace Luis Suarez, precisely because he bites people. I’ve always viewed Suarez’s biting incidents as Freudian slips, accidental confessions of insecurity about his conspicuous teeth, his horsey overbite. Suarez is an exuberant guy, and, I think, this exuberance fuels an anxious fixation on his teeth that is totally understandable, and then, in rare moments of emotional wildness on the football pitch, and in the classic manner of the Freudian slip, he does the nightmare thing he’s consumed with not doing: he makes the whole world think about his teeth. When those incidents have happened, I’ve given brief consideration to the startled guy with fresh bite-marks on his shoulder, but my enduring sympathies lie with the biter, Luis Suarez, whose morbid unease with his own teeth has just performed itself again, in public.
Likewise, when one of those discomfiting laughs escapes from Kamala Harris, to circulate for the world’s mockery as viral content on the internet, my deepest reflex is not to mock her as well but to sympathise with her. Like Luis Suarez laying out his dental anxieties through acts of biting, Harris seems to be speaking in subtext when her laugh bursts the bounds of normality: “I know this is unnatural!” she’s saying. “I’m trying to be ‘likeable’ but I can’t keep it from being weird!”
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