At the table, someone tells a joke about people who are not there.
Most laugh.
One person does not.
“Don’t be so sensitive.”
The conversation moves on.
What was everyone asked to accept?
Humour can expose power, make difficulty bearable and tell truths that ordinary speech cannot carry. The problem is not laughter.
But “it was only a joke” often appears after someone has objected. The sentence does more than defend the joke. It shifts responsibility: the person who feels wounded becomes oversensitive or difficult. Everyone else is invited to continue as though nothing happened.
A joke creates a small community among those who understand it. It may also reveal who is expected to bear the cost of belonging.
Repeated jokes about women, migrants, bodies, weakness or difference do not automatically produce violent acts. But they can make contempt familiar. And what becomes familiar grows harder to recognise and easier to excuse.
Resistance does not require a humourless culture. It begins by asking what the laughter permits, whom it protects and who must remain silent so that everyone else can keep enjoying it.
A culture reveals itself not only in what it condemns, but in what it permits itself to laugh at.
Photo: Nemika F / Pexels
