The luxury of ridicule
Being able to endure mockery is a sure sign of humanity and humility — which is why we must beware those who can’t, says Hugo Rifkind
Listen to article
Narrated by Hugo Rifkind
No one enjoys ridicule. Or at least, no one who perhaps doesn’t also enjoy expensive appointments in some kind of a dungeon that involve experiences we simply can’t write about in a family newspaper, not even next to the fashion pages. To be ridiculed is to be taken unseriously; to be deemed not worthy of the effort of disagreement, or even of hatred. “Oh Lord,” Voltaire prayed, in one of my favourite lines of anything written by anyone, “make my enemies ridiculous.”
Philosophers, as a general rule, are pretty damn wary of ridicule. “Errors in religion are dangerous,” David Hume wrote, “those in philosophy only ridiculous.” It’s a fascinating line and much less self-deprecating than it first appears. One cannot use ridicule in philosophy because the moment one does, one is no longer performing philosophy at all. The most savage way to win any argument, indeed, is to prove that your interlocutor is being ridiculous when they don’t even realise it. This is the reductio ad absurdum, the distillation of an opponent’s point until you expose the sheer silliness at its heart. Call a philosopher a bitch and she’ll ask you why she doesn’t have a tail.
When ridicule works it can be hard to recover from. Think of Twelfth Night and Malvolio in his cross-gartered yellow stockings. Or, if politics is more your bag, think of John Major with his shirt tucked into his Y-fronts. It doesn’t even matter that he never did it; the power of ridicule is so strong that the parody overrides the real. When satire is done well, the subject never recovers. In 2021, to mark the tenth anniversary of Kim Jong-il’s death, North Korea banned laughter for 11 days.
• We really can’t wait 15 months for an election
• Big Tech is made for the risk-taking man-child
• It used to be a laugh . . . except for the women
We should always, though, remember Peter Cook’s bitterly dry remarks about “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”. As in: ridicule can assault power, but it doesn’t always win. Tyranny that conquers ridicule may be the most terrifying and inhuman tyranny there is. Think of George Orwell on the ludicrous goose-step beloved of fascist regimes, which he described as “simply an affirmation of naked power”. The goose-stepper positively dares you to laugh at him, while offering you, as Orwell continues, “the vision of a boot crashing down on a face”.
Advertisement
Donald Trump is a surprisingly difficult figure to satirise. People assume that it is easy but, take it from me, it’s not. That’s because normally the art involves taking the real and turning the dial up to 11, where it becomes absurd. Trump lives at 11. Nothing you can pretend he would say is more ridiculous than what he actually will say. His hair is the modern goose-step. Much like Orwell’s fascists, Trump is ridiculous precisely because ridicule is what he fears. So he makes it his own, rather than letting it be yours.
For those of us who are neither goose-steppers nor Donald Trump, all of this gives us an idea of how ridicule can be a luxury. What none of us wants to be is ridiculous by mistake. But on purpose? For me, the first thing that springs to mind is that photograph of Lenny Kravitz wearing an enormous scarf. It’s not a blanket; it’s scarf-shaped and has tassels. Yet it is also the width of a pavement and the length of, well, Lenny Kravitz, even after it has been looped around his head. He wore it once in 2012 and no one who saw it can forget. And it is ridiculous, but not by mistake. For he is Lenny Kravitz. He can look amazing in a ridiculous scarf. He has that luxury. Do you?
Not all fashion is ridiculous. Just most of it. High heels are clearly ridiculous. Diamonds — polished, useless stones worth as much as houses — are more ridiculous still. That bag you want that costs more than your car? You know how ridiculous that is, right?
Not once, except for perhaps in a Mountain Warehouse catalogue, have I seen a model who doesn’t look ridiculous. Sometimes it’s extreme. Think Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala in 2021, wearing head-to-toe black Balenciaga that made her look like a silhouette and even covered her face. Nobody could pretend that wasn’t ridiculous. Imagine going to brunch like that. Imagine eating an egg. A night out would be no better: cabs wouldn’t stop, you’d be mown down crossing the road.
Some people hate fashion for its ridiculousness, as if fashion were being ridiculous by mistake and didn’t know. This is, of course, nonsense. In a sense, nothing could be more luxurious than the ridiculous, because it is that very ridiculousness that elevates a thing to the status of a luxury. And this is true not only of fashion. There are types of caviar that will set you back a thousand pounds for 100g. You could buy about a quarter of a ton of crabsticks for that. Ridiculous. But that’s the point. A boring, sensible fleece will never be ridiculous. Unless you wear it to the Met Gala, I suppose.
