Ten years after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, is humor under threat?

It is the thermometer of democracy. We are lucky to have a right to humor and a justice system that does its job.

I only know of two states in which I have been incapable of humor: depression and disappointment in love. There, nothing funny, no irony, not the slightest trace of self-deprecation. For the rest, no taboo. I can laugh at anything, and I could probably establish a hierarchy from the most laughable to the least hilarious.

Some jokes seem to me to be a failure, some jokes make me bend over backwards, and most of the time I smile. I would like things to stay like this, that we don't assassinate anyone for a drawing, that we don't censor puns, that we don't take offense at a joke which, if misinterpreted, could hurt .

I don't have a very original opinion on this subject, but a strong conviction: humor is the thermometer of democracy. The one that we place under the tongue, or elsewhere, if we have a little more down to earth humor.

This is the case law of the European Court of Human Rights: « Freedom of expression applies not only to information or ideas that are received with fervor or considered harmless, but also to those that offend, shock or worry the State or any segment of the population. This is what pluralism, tolerance and the spirit of openness require, without which there is no democratic society. »

However, to listen to some people, we should no longer hurt anyone. We should support financial violence, managerial incompetence, unfair political decisions, fatwas and genocides… without laughing about it. And no more jokes because you're fat, bald, one-legged or blonde. One should not mock the powerful and never show disrespect to a group that worships an imaginary friend.

We should protect minorities from irony, derision, caricature. Couldn't we say anything more? Yet yes, because we are lucky to have a right to humor, a jurisprudence, a justice system that does its job. She will distinguish the bon mot from the insult, the caricature from defamation, the parody from plagiarism. With its tools, justice differentiates the harasser from the joker, the anti-Semite from the comedian. It condemns the first and protects the last.

In law, humor must respect two conditions. First, the right tone: deliberately outrageous, sarcastic, it reveals a fanciful character, without pretension to seriousness. Then, the quality of comedian must be designated and announced as such. The humor is clearly emitted by a joker who uses an appropriate tone: that's the contract.

If there is any ambiguity, the contract is broken. If we do not accept these rules, there is a danger for democracy. The judge, at his bench, must gauge the comedian's intention. As we gauge the joke about the drunken uncle at the end of a family meal: isn't the one we could take for a big racist pig saving democracy? That is the question.

Humor has never been so present. It is reactionary censorship and the “gorafization of the world” that threaten it.

I'm not convinced that humor is really threatened. In reality, it has never been so omnipresent, particularly in the media space (news shows and even sports shows now have their comedian(s) on duty, when they are not speaking in the second degree). We still need to agree on its definition: Alain Vaillant, one of the best specialists in comic culture, recalls that laughter is a cognitive disengagement, an uncontrolled reflex which connects us to our animal condition; humor is what humans invented to domesticate laughter and try to make it intelligent.

Charlie Hebdo has always refuted this intelligence of laughter: it is the heir of Hara-Kiri which was defined as “stupid and wicked”. After the disgusting attack to which the editorial staff was the victim, we were able to make it endorse a series of republican values ​​and functions which in no way define it.

It has also often been repeated that Islamist terrorism found an ally in a form of puritanism – this is the famous “We can no longer say anything” ; However, this statement is false. On the contrary, the space of possibilities has never been so open to the transgression of taboos: we can no longer count the stand-up shows relaying jokes about incest or pedophilia, supposed to be provocative but becoming as banal as not very subversive.

Today, the democratization of public speech is accompanied by a development of criticism: it can be uncomfortable, as it is part of an era of evaluation where everyone allows themselves to judge the other, but it at least has the merit of allowing discussions on the effects of laughter and the interpretive communities that it implies.

Recently, after having made insulting remarks about the historian Ludivine Bantigny, the writer François Bégaudeau saw fit to play the red-faced humor card. The problem is that he pretended not to take into account the situation of enunciation: uttered by an author benefiting from a certain visibility, his diatribe did not fit into a comic framework and produced nothing other than gratuitous violence. Laughter is not just a liberating device; it can also be an instrument of domination.

If there is nonetheless a threat to humor today, in addition to an obvious reactionary censorship (think of what happened at France Inter), it lies in what Frédéric Lordon called the “gorafization of the world” : faced with the perfect absurdity of certain situations, is it still possible to use humor?

We were able to amuse ourselves with the similarities between OSS 117 and the president in office, but when the latter allows himself to insult the Mahorais who have lost everything, does he not go far beyond the fictional character, producing a new caricature of himself hardly inviting laughter?

To go further : “Laughing in a contemporary regime”, by Denis Saint Amand and Alain Vaillant in the magazine Fixxion.