Laugh a Little

I like to laugh. To clown around. I frequently encourage others to do similarly. Often, I lapse into such bouts of immaturity I fear the Claremont Institute will ship me off to a sanatorium. But it turns out my colleagues are also a merry lot of jokesters.  

We tend, here, to identify more with Falstaff. There is not a person on staff like Cassius. 

Happy warriors is a fair appellation, except that it does not quite capture our spirit. We are not simply happy, we are mirthful.  

This is all in contrast with our counterparts at, say, the New York Times or Vox. Life is very serious for them. Laughing at the wrong thing over there can get you on a cancellation shortlist. Better to not laugh at all and just be overly outraged at even the most minuscule things.

But if you want to make it through life, you need laughter, and plenty of it. More than that, a comic disposition—so long as it does not lapse into cynicism—provides a nice, detached lens through which to analyze political phenomena. Your easily provoked pundit has blinders on.  

Laughter and fun-making is something the left suspects is absent from the right. Their suspicion is founded on the fact that, since we take morality seriously, we must be stuffy by nature.

By and large, that categorization is incorrect. Like Ben Franklin, one of our heroes at Claremont, we imitate both Jesus and Socrates.

The next few years of the Harris administration will prove taxing, stupid, and unfunny. We can probably even add injurious to this list. So, learn to bear up and learn to do it ready to give and receive a good joke. It will make life in the Gulag much more bearable.  

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David Bahr is the Claremont Institute’s senior communications director.