The Threat of a Woman’s Laugh

Donald Trump doesn’t really laugh. He smirks; he bares his teeth silently. Sometimes he folds his arms or shakes his head to register humor, as he did during a 2019 rally in Florida, when he asked the assembled crowd what to do about migrants crossing the border and a spectator shouted in response, “Shoot them!” But he hardly ever laughs out loud. Mary Trump, his niece, has said that Fred Trump, the former president’s father, drilled into his son that “laughing is to make yourself vulnerable, it’s to let down your guard in some way, it’s to lose a little bit of control. And that can’t happen.”

Clearly, for Trump, laughter is loaded. Caught short by the disorienting speed with which Vice President Kamala Harris has become the presumptive 2024 Democratic nominee for president, Trump has struggled to come up with attack lines against her. But his comments during a rally on Saturday suggested one specific target: Harris’s laugh. “I call her ‘laughing Kamala,’” he said. “Have you ever watched her laugh? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh … She is nuts.” Harris does indeed laugh; on TikTok, videos of her cackling joyfully during panel discussions and interviews have been making the rounds, with most commenters failing to find them anything but endearing. “Her laugh is wholesome,” one woman wrote below a Daily Mail montage. “It’s honest and human,” another added, and a third said, “I love her laugh. It’s genuinely hers.”

This last point is what some on the right seem to be trying to latch on to—the idea that Harris’s laughter might betray something else about her. “The woman continually laughs this ridiculous laugh,” the far-right Australian commentator Teena McQueen said on Sky News Australia last year. “I don’t know what drugs she’s on, or what makes her so happy all the time, but she’s an absolute disgrace and she hasn’t done women any favors.” Women who laugh in public have historically been associated with a lack of social modesty, with hysteria, and even with madness. In insisting that Harris’s laugh is somehow a sign of psychological depravity or narcotic-induced lack of inhibitions, conservatives are doing their best to couple Harris in people’s subconscious with a specific reaction: disgust.

[Sophie Gilbert: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]

As the philosopher Kate Manne notes in her 2017 book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, disgust has long been the weapon of choice for conservatives faced with women who try to gain political power. Disgust, Manne writes, is “a moralizing influence that intensifies and even drives novel moral judgments—in some cases, powerfully. It turns out that even mild ‘pangs’ of disgust can cause some people to judge that someone is suspicious and up to no good, even when such judgments clearly have no rational basis—when what the person was doing was entirely innocent, even praiseworthy.” And conservatives, as the science writer Kathleen McAuliffe reported in The Atlantic in 2019, are more likely to have disgust reactions triggered by specific images than liberals, which makes them more likely in turn to “make harsher moral judgments.”

This is by no means the first time that the politics of disgust have been deployed—crudely but effectively—against women. In 2007, when Hillary Clinton first announced that she was running for president, Rush Limbaugh questioned on his radio show whether the country really wanted to see “a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis.” Clinton’s laugh, too, was mocked, and associated with awkwardness and weirdness. When Trump cites Harris’s laugh as evidence of the fact that she’s supposedly “nuts,” he’s not just calling out a distinctive laugh; he’s helping his audiences draw a connection in their own minds between her emotional composure in public and her moral standing as a political leader.

Conservatives haven’t stopped at Harris’s laugh. Over the past few days, Megyn Kelly has taken aim at Harris’s personal life, writing on X that she “did sleep her way into and upward in California politics.” Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, in archival footage from a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson, lambasted her for not having had children, calling her a “childless cat lady” with no “direct stake” in America. Both of these attacks are aimed to engender disgust. Both are transparent attempts to get the public to see Harris as a promiscuous opportunist and a threat to the traditional social fabric of America. And both are wholly unoriginal lines with which to smear a woman in politics, which is perhaps why, for now at least, they’re failing to stick.

Those who seem triggered by Harris’s laugh, though, might feel the way they do for a reason. In her book The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, the media scholar Kathleen Rowe Karlyn remarks that when women laugh on film and television, they reframe themselves as subjects rather than objects, asserting their right to an emotional response “that expresses anger, resistance, solidarity, and joy.” In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as women became more politically active in the United States, wild rumors circulated that some who went to vaudeville shows or comic movies ended up laughing themselves to death. “Fun-loving women,” the literature professor Maggie Hennefeld writes, “were being terrorized into believing that their unrestrained pleasure could destroy them.”

In many recent cultures, laughter for women has been an outright transgressive act. Under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the former first lady Laura Bush noted in a 2001 speech, women faced beatings if they were seen laughing. And when the former Turkish deputy prime minister counseled women in 2014 not to laugh in public, lest they signal their “moral corruption,” Turkish women responded on social media by posting pictures of themselves defiantly laughing. “The men of a country in which women are not allowed to laugh are cowards,” one man wrote in solidarity at the time.

Part of what makes the attacks on Harris’s laugh seem so bizarre is that her laugh is both genuine and contagious—a sign of a woman expressing joy without neurosis or self-consciousness or repression. Laughter has a social function that binds people together and signals connection; we are 30 times more likely to laugh out loud in groups than we are alone. These acts of recognizable nonlinguistic communication are a key part of what makes us human. “Let me just tell you something: I have my mother’s laugh,” Harris told Drew Barrymore earlier this year. “And I grew up around a bunch of women in particular who laughed from the belly. They laughed. They would sit around the kitchen, drinking their coffee, telling big stories with big laughs.” They also taught her, she said, not to be limited by “other people’s perception” of how a person should be. What Trump interprets as vulnerability may end up being a sign of Harris’s greatest strength.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.