AUTHORITY AND LAUGHTER

Hannah Arendt, in her small but powerful work, "On Violence," discusses authority. She defines it as something that is invested--that is, authority is given by a group, a tradition, an election, a fiat to a person and/or an office. Churches vest authority in bishops, the US vests authority in elected and appointed officials, society vests authority in parents, and so forth. Then authority is extended--to the Bible, to the older child "left in charge" as the parents go shopping, to police.

What I loved about Arendt's discussion is that she recognized that so long as authority is posited and accepted--so long as it is "taken seriously"--it retains, maybe even increases, its power. This is just as true when people unquestioningly submit to authority as it is when people take a stance against authority. Go ahead: read that last sentence again! When people are either for or against authority, either affirming it or questioning it, authority itself remains in place. We can be for or against a president--as many were with the second President Bush--but so long as this is where the battlelines are drawn, the authority of the office of the president remains intact.

So what Arendt points out is that the single greatest threat to authority is...laughter! Humor, finding the ridiculous, a refusal to take something or someone seriously: these are the tools that defang authority of its power.

This is why, I believe, that the two most influential persons in getting Obama elected last fall were Tina Fey and Jon Stewart. These two refused to take the posturing of the Bush administration and then the Republican candidates for president and vice-president seriously. They accomplished the equivalent of the child in the "Emperor's New Clothes" who proclaimed that the emperor was, indeed, naked.

Many times we have been hurt by authority, and the notion of "not taking it seriously" cuts very deeply: to do so would (seem to) mean taking our hurts less seriously...our entrenched grudges could not continued to be fed and fueled. Yet something better could arise in their place. What would happen if we found the place within to laugh at a putative authority figure and say, "Oh, that's just Michael being Michael!" or "Isn't that cute--the same old bluster!" or "Poor thing--he thinks that God has nothing better to do than to peep into people's bedroom windows!"

If people don't confer it, there is no authority. If people don't take it seriously, authority can't and won't be taken seriously.