Kamala Harris and the power of laughter

She's called mad (and worse), but let's be surprised by her joy, writes George Pitcher

Described as a Sky News contributor (is that a job?), someone called Teena McQueen very seriously delivered herself of the opinion that putative Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris “continues to laugh this ridiculous laugh. I don’t know what drugs she’s on or what makes her so happy all the time. She’s an absolute disgrace.”

For the Republican leadership, it’s evidence of insanity. “She is crazy,” diagnoses GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. “You can tell a lot by a laugh. She is nuts.”

For his running mate, JD Vance, Harris’s happy laugh is evidence that she’s in reality deeply miserable at not having reproduced herself. He chivalrously told Fox News way back in 2021 that Harris is one of a “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”

Fame for a laugh: Let it go…

So “Laughing Kamala”, as perma-scowling Trump has uninterestingly dubbed her, is both mad and sad precisely because she laughs so much. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? But, in the interests of fact-checking, it is perhaps worth tracking down this laughter, just to check out that it really is the evil cackle of a deranged maniac.

A compilation of Harris laughs, at a little over two minutes, is easy enough to find online. I’ve watched it three times and found her gales of unbridled laughter utterly infectious. Only the most mirthless political opponent (you know who you are) could, in my view, listen to it without at some point chuckling along. And we don’t even know what she was laughing at.

Gripped by giggles at sheer absurdity

It’s difficult to think of another top-line politician who laughs like this. In living memory, Ronald Reagan was a laugher, but really only at set gags. Bill Clinton chuckled and Barack Obama was a frequent smiler. But none were regularly gripped by helpless giggles at the sheer absurdity of life’s circumstances, as is Harris.

In the UK, we’ve had grinners – Tony Blair and David Cameron come to mind. Theresa May could smile, but not with her eyes. The circus clown Boris Johnson only had a defendant’s smirk. Liz Truss squeaked and shrieked momentarily on occasion. None gave themselves up to laughter, as does Harris.

Elsewhere, I can think of none who would even vaguely match her. Vladimir Putin looks like he’s never laughed in his life and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with his background in professional comedy, has not had anything to laugh about for a long time. Where else to go? Australia doesn’t laugh anymore, if Sky News is any judge.

Po-faced Fox anchor

So what is Harris’s laughter about? There’s a clue in a clip of her that the po-faced Fox anchor, Peta Credlin, ran in her attempted take-down. It was supposed to reference Harris’s “word salad”, with “PR professional” Prue Macsween claiming that outgoing president Joe Biden and Harris are as unintelligible as each other.

In that clip, Harris refers to “a reflection of joy… it comes in the morning.” One cannot be sure, because it was indeed a well-tossed word salad, whether Harris was chanelling the 1931 hymn Morning Has Broken or more probably referencing Psalm 30:5 . But the word “joy” is, I think, key. There is a lot that is joyful about Harris’s laugh.

Joyful laughter is distinguishable from other forms of laughter. At its most liberated, it is ecstatic. It’s as if we’re out of control, as if, indeed, we’re in the grip of something larger than ourselves. This is a gift that, in the world of politics at least, seems to have been given to Harris alone. And the rest look on her as mad.

Moments like signposts

In his 1955 semi-autobiographical book, Surprised By Joy, CS Lewis writes that his and our lives have “stabs” of joy, moments of intensity that are like signposts, as if we’re lost in the woods. This is truly joyful laughter in the ecstatic sense, a glimpse of something uncontrollably greater than us, the sort of euphoria that gripped hostage John McCarthy in the late Eighties in his prison cell in Lebanon, when he prayed in his darkest despair.

Harris hasn’t suffered like that, but her life has not been easy. It may be that her almost trance-like laughter is an unconscious physical response to the discrimination she has encountered as an ambitious, black, female politician, with a complex family life.

For St Paul, joy is one of the nine fruit (not fruits) of the spirit. Not only is it shared – like laughter – but it’s something that affliction and persecution can’t quench. In his day, too, observers looked on those in possession of such spirit as drunk or mad. Intriguingly, that Sky News contributor called Harris one of the “two fruit-loops at the helm.”

Fruit-loop she may well be, but maybe too our politics could do with being a little surprised by joy. Because the alternative is no laughing matter.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest

A version of this column first appeared on PremierChristianity