Read more about Brett Kavanaugh and the revealing logic of ‘boys will be boys’

Perhaps this is why so many people have gone out of their way, over the past week, to insist that the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh are nothing more than a punch line. Testifying to the Senate last week, Kavanaugh himself dismissed “the Swetnick thing” using the condemnatory language of comedy: Julie Swetnick’s allegations weren’t merely untrue, he said. They were a “joke” and a “farce.” Bob Corker, the senator from Tennessee, was approached last week by women who wanted to ask him, as an agent of the government entrusted with their safety, whether the Senate was doing enough for victims of sexual assault. Corker dismissed them thusly: “I know this is enjoyable to y’all.” The congressman Ralph Norman warmed up the crowd during a recent debate with a joke: “Did y’all hear this latest late-breaking news from the Kavanaugh hearings?” he asked, grinning. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg came out that she was groped by Abraham Lincoln.”

Laughter, weaponized as a tool against empathy and progress and change: It is not limited, of course, to the realm of electoral politics. Late on Sunday evening, just around midnight, the Comedy Cellar once again hosted a performance offered up by the comedian Louis C.K. The New York Post reported that the audience for this surprise set, given C.K.s failure to make a public acknowledgment of the ways he mistreated some of his women colleagues, had been “unhappy”—particularly because, as one viewer recalled it, “he made some comment like, ‘I’ve been off for a while, ’cause everyone needs a break.’” On Monday evening, however, The Hollywood Reporter posted audio of the beginning of the set, recorded ostensibly as C.K. strode onstage. All that is audible in the recording is cheers. Whoops. Whistles. It was the same brand of enthusiasm that would be on display in an arena in Mississippi on Tuesday evening. The complicity of a crowd prepared to laugh with Louis C.K. rather than at him, as he ensures, set by set, that the world will carry on as it always has. Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.

Comedy, Hannah Gadsby reminded the world recently, is inherently a political exercise. It is about who has the luxury of laughter—who is distant enough from a fact of the world to find humor in it—and who does not. Comedy is also about who gets to tell the joke, to author it and frame it as they see fit, and who doesn’t. (See, for example: Roseanne’s revealing line about Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat. And, then, Roseanne’s just-as-revealing line about the former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett’s hairdo.) Laughter can bring people together; it can also, however, make insidious arguments about who belongs, and who does not.

Just after Ford testified about her indelible memories of sexual trauma, the actress who voices General Leia in the upcoming animated TV series Star Wars Resistance tweeted a video in which she repeatedly mocked Ford’s voice during the professor’s testimony. (The tweet has now been deleted.) Last weekend, on Saturday Night Live, Matt Damon, the man who once diagnosed #MeToo as part of a “culture of outrage,” parodied the Supreme Court nominee who made that outrage manifest—a performance that made light of Brett Kavanaugh’s anger while finding easy humor in it. Later in the show, Pete Davidson appeared as himself on “Weekend Update,” discussing his whirlwind engagement to Ariana Grande. Davidson’s jokes pivoted on the idea that Grande, being a pop star, is wealthier and more powerful than he is; one of the jokes’ punch lines, as a cap to the week in which women were confronted yet again with reminders of the multifront war against their bodily autonomy, was this: “Last night I switched her birth control with Tic Tacs … I believe in us and all, but I just want to make sure that she can’t go anywhere.”