Banish With Laughter

When everything is funny, nothing is sacred

Something is happening. A sick, rancid disease has been slowly spreading for years, but it has only become detectable now. It’s invisible, but everywhere. You can feel it, can’t you? Deep in your bones, you have this insidious, persistent feeling that something is very wrong. People don’t react to things the way we used to, even in fairly recent history. You see it every day when you open your phone, when you talk with friends, when you read the news, when you watch TV. Something has infected us, and we are very sick.

I’m talking, of course, about why everything is so fucking funny now. Why our knee jerk reaction to everything is to make a joke out of it. It’s everywhere now, from Broadway musicals about to Holocaust, to films about rape, to our deeply stupid government. Nothing is sacred, everything is a joke, and I hate it here.

There is an old phrase in occult circles that I think diagnoses this problem pretty well: “banish with laughter.” Laughter is a banishing ritual. If you have invoked a big scary demon that threatens to fuck your shit up, you don’t necessarily have to burn fancy herbs or recite chants to get rid of it, you just have to laugh at it. Magically speaking, laughter robs everything, material, spiritual, emotional, of its power, and gives that power to you.

It’s strangely hard to pin down where this phrase actually comes from. At this point my best guess is it was either Dion Fortune, Robert Anton Wilson, Peter Carroll, or Grant Morrison who first said it, and that doesn’t really narrow the field. Either way, it remains a true observation, regardless of who first coined the exact phrase.

(Photo: Astrid Kruse Jensen)

In magic, there are two mundane ways to desecrate something, to make something un-sacred, that doesn’t require the tools or pomp of ritual. The first is over-analyzing it. In order to dissect something, you must kill it first. You cannot analyze the bible purely as a piece of western literature if you also believe it is the infallible word of God. You can’t just cut down a whole forest if it is a living being with as many rights as you. Putting things into a purely analytical framework, where it exists only to be poked, prodded, and quantified on your terms robs it of any sacredness. It disenchants it.

The other way to do this is laughter. There is a metaphysics to laughter that I think a lot of people miss. All laughter is a banishing ritual, it is the ultimate way to desecrate something, to rob it of its power and sacredness. If you can laugh at something, it does not scare you, evokes no awe in you. If you can laugh at something, it has no power and deserves little to no respect. How do you kill a god? Laugh at it.

Our culture feels absolutely sick with laughter. It has infected every interaction, every piece of media, all the ways that we see and process with world around us. Everything, no matter how horrific and serious, gets turned into a meme within hours of it happening now. This goes for movies and tv shows, to the halls of power. Not to be hyperbolic or anything, but I think all this laughter is literally tearing at the fabric of reality.

Look at this post. Really look at it. This is where it’s all been leading to. All the sick, depraved humor fostered online for the last two decades, it’s all been leading to The White House posting memes about deporting people.

I’m going to sound like an annoying holy roller here, but this is an act of spiritual warfare. For all the right’s talk about religion and god, they don’t believe in anything and hold nothing sacred, though only to a slightly larger degree than the rest of the culture.

It’s in the post above, it’s in the shit-eating grin politicians have at town halls as they talk about voter suppression, it’s in all those funny salutes these guys are doing that you are apparently stupid and annoying for taking too seriously. In all these moments, what gets me is the laughter that accompanies it all. Nothing is serious, everything is a joke, which means everything is up for grabs by whoever laughs the hardest.

Think about the recent profile in New York Magazine on young conservatives in Manhattan, and how much of their decision to support a second Trump term came primarily from an urge to make fun of people. The right to laugh. Or how Elon Musk triumphantly declared at CPAC that “comedy is legal again.” This isn’t about free speech or a reaction against people being annoying or uptight online. This is a metaphysical war to desecrate your enemy and rob them of dignity, personhood, and any semblance of humanity. This is a war of disenchantment.

Even if you don’t buy my argument on a spiritual level or can’t take my woo-speak, you cannot deny the political use and expediency of laughter. In the 1944 essay, Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of antisemitism “Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”

To the point above, in 2017 Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, made laughter an explicit tactic of the site:

None of this has ever been a joke to the people telling the jokes, and being afraid of being cringe for taking them seriously plays right into their hands.

There’s been discussion for a while now about how our culture’s obsession with making a joke out of everything, of finding everything, no matter how depraved, funny reveals a deeper fear of intimacy. I think this is true, but it misses the deeper point. Intimacy, whether physical, emotional, or intellectual is a primarily mystical experience because it blurs the boundary between one being and another. To see a piece of art and connect with it, is to temporarily become part of it. To complete the loop between art and audience. If you feel what a character feels, or empathize with what an artist is depicting, the boundary between you and them temporarily disappears. Your emotions are, momentarily, one, and you are moved outside of yourself.

(Photo: Eileen Cowin)

Is it any wonder why rightwing freaks fear this? Why banishing with laughter is one of the primary tools in their spiritual arsenal? The more intimate, empathetic people are, the more arbitrary boundaries definitionally disappear. Borders, gender, authority, nationality all these things begin to feel at least a little but stupid if you can experience real empathy for another.

I realize that this post is going to make me sound like a buzzkill, killjoy, or “that friend who is too woke” but when everything is funny, is anything funny? Actors like Vince Vaughn have pointed out that very few comedic movies get greenlit these days, and point to issues like lack of IP or broad issues with how movies get funded currently as reasons. I think this is true, but I also think it’s because on a deep level comedy has permeated every aspect of culture. Ethel Cain recently referred to this as an “irony epidemic” that is stifling art. Almost all online content that goes viral or gains traction has something funny about it. Pretty much all TikToks, reels, posts need to have some humor in them to even get seen. There is no designated place for comedy to live in as a genre because everything is comedy now. It’s all one big joke.

Notice this, really notice this, in the way you interact with other people, media, art, all of it. None of us are immune, and no one has escaped this. Notice when you make a joke when looking at something very serious, when you brush off intimacy with humor, when you punctuate a heartfelt text with an “lol” because, of course, the worst thing you can be these days is serious. We must not be cringe, and surely no one can think we actually care. It’s not that deep.

The paradox here is that in order to have the boundary destroying empathy that connects you with something outside yourself, you actually have to put boundaries around some things and designate them as sacred. You have to decide, as a society, that certain places, times, occasions are not to be made fun of. You draw a circle around yourself in magical work not just to protect yourself, but to designate a space as sacred. That is, to make it a place where certain things must be done, and others cannot, because the sacred is where the transcendent enters through. It really must be emphasized, for all Americans talk about religion, we find almost nothing sacred. Especially now. Maybe we can’t all go full killjoy, but we should at least try growing up. Get real, before it gets real.