‘This is not comedy! Pay attention': from Cabaret to Trump rallies, why does audience laughter feel so sinister?

The Guardian

20-03-2025

Every night on a new Broadway production of Cabaret, Adam Lambert waits to see how the audience will react to one of the show's biggest numbers, If You Could See Her. The song sees Lambert's Emcee dancing with a performer in a gorilla costume and finishes with him looking into the ape's eyes singing: 'If you could see her through my eyes / She wouldn't look Jewish at all.'
The line is supposed to represent the normalisation of bigotry, demonstrating how the Kit Kat Club, once the most immoderate, carefree cabaret club in Berlin, has amended its routines in order to placate the new Nazi patrons. The moment used to provoke gasps from audiences. But during this run, which spanned the US general election campaign and second Trump presidency, there have been many nights when the cast have heard guffaws in the crowd.
Last month, Lambert began addressing the audience directly when they laughed. 'No!' he shouted, off-script but in character. 'This is not comedy. Pay attention.'
Cabaret is unusual among musicals of the 1960s, which tended to pitch bohemians and the working class against the grey squares of the establishment (usually with a free-spirited woman softening a fusty male lead). Cabaret has its share of Germanic pixie dream girls, but tells a more complex story of how the artists of Europe became distracted by camp and hedonism on the road to fascism in the 1930s. Inspired by Goodbye To Berlin, Christopher Isherwood's novel about the final years of the Weimar Republic, the musical rebukes artists who choose to ignore politics and has been held up as a cautionary tale about the evils of distraction since its premiere in 1966.
This production of Cabaret aims to produce a sense of complicity in the audience. Like many post-Punchdrunk theatre experiences, it incorporates elements of interactivity and exploration – the bar staff stay loosely in character and there are little Nuremberg's Got Talent style sideshows before the production begins. Those in the front row receive luxurious Bavarian desserts during the intermission. As the whipped cream congeals, the play pivots in its second act to the rise of fascism, with the revelrous burlesquers now singing nationalist screeds. The play's own smart business model – flogging packages of indulgence alongside regular tickets – adds to the sense of audience connivance. The sundaes on the front tables begin to look perverse, even acquiescent.
Even so, the audience laughing at an antisemitic line comparing a person in an ape costume to a Jewish woman wasn't something the show's production team had expected. That's why last month, Lambert began calling out theatergoers, on one occasion waiting for the show's close to tell them to 'read a book'.
The line – which was written by Fred Ebb, who is Jewish, set to music by John Kander, who is Jewish, and sung by Lambert, who is Jewish – has caused controversy since the play was first staged. Joel Grey, who played the Emcee in the original 1960s production, wrote that 'audiences gasped and recoiled' when he sung it because it 'was too offensive, too raw, too cruel'.
By the time the show had transferred from Boston to Broadway, the line was changed to 'she isn't a meeskite at all', a Yiddish word meaning 'not very nice' that is referenced in an earlier song. The 'Jewish' line was reinstated for the film version starring Liza Minnelli and directed by Bob Fosse (who was nervous that studio heads would demand it be taken out the script, which is why it's whispered with no musical accompaniment, so it could be easily removed).
The line since remained in most productions, but this is the first time that a cast has complained the audiences are finding it funny rather than shocking. 'Today, the line is playing exactly as the Nazi-sympathizing Emcee would have intended,' Grey wrote.
'I don't know why people laugh,' says Auliʻi Cravalho, who plays Sally Bowles in the Broadway production, 'but at that moment, I'm underneath the stage ready to come through the floor, and I have my fingers crossed and my eyes closed every single show, because it affects the rest of the second act. Am I going to be pleading with the audience to understand? Or can I just let the text speak for itself?'
Now, as US immigration authorities detain people for legal protest and universities are defunded for teaching perspectives that don't align with those of the Trump administration, this Broadway revival has taken on a new sense of urgency. As the US slides into authoritarianism, people have even started posting a meme in which a woman says: 'How did we go from brat summer to fascist winter?' and another replies: 'Babe, that's literally the plot of Cabaret.'
In this atmosphere, the actors of Cabaret are not the only people chilled by the sound of others laughing at an ugly joke. At a time when many feel powerless and disoriented, some laughter doesn't feel funny at all.
It's not a coincidence that the right has focused so heavily on bad-taste humor in recent years, with Musk saying he wants to 'legalize' comedy and Trump booking Tony Hinchcliffe to make racist jokes about Puerto Ricans at his rallies. Every playground bully knows that the most effective tool to humiliate someone is not to ball your hand into a fist, but to point and laugh.
The writer and sex work activist Marla Cruz said she was 'nauseated by the audience's laughter' during a scene from this year's best picture winner Anora, when the titular female character is bound and gagged. Many others have described similar discomfort with the scene, which has a sinister but screwball energy, a subtlety that is lost in the din of harsh male laughter.
There's further unease at the presence of laughter in our new cruel politics, the chuckles of Joe Rogan and his guests (people like Jordan Peterson or the 'Holocaust revisionist' historian Darryl Cooper) pontificate on the role of women in society. In one episode, a comedian 'guffawed' as he recounted how he 'broke' a female comic by making her perform oral sex in exchange for stage time.
During Trump's election campaign roars reverberated around rallies when someone in the crowd shouted that Kamala Harris 'worked on the corner' or that Trump should shoot immigrants as they try to cross the border. In both instances, Trump had to step away from the mic, unable to continue over the sound of laughing.
Now in office he continues playing to the gallery, addressing Congress with the xenophobic jibe that the US was sending '$8m dollars to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of' to laughs from his own party, the shoulders of JD Vance and Mike Johnson bobbing in hearty sycophancy. Other strongman leaders have followed suit; when a federal judge ordered Trump to turn around three planes of alleged gang members on their way to El Salvador, the country's president, Nayib Bukele, jokingly tweeted (and Trump reposted): 'Oopsie … too late,' about the refusal to comply with a federal judge.
Indeed, perhaps the defining feature of this era of politics is that it's not solemn. Trump is a gifted comic, not just for his name-calling taunts but his sense of timing. His surrealist obsessions with whales, wind farms and Hannibal Lecter and his almost Lynchian dance moves could have earned him a standup slot at the Kit Kat Club (if he was willing to put on a leather leotard). Before he became president he famously took part in a Comedy Central Roast, making digs at his fellow roasters The Situation and Snoop Dogg. His incredible campaigning power relied on similar material and cadence – his 10-minute rant about posing as a garbage man is rhythmically and structurally indistinguishable from a Comedy Cellar set.
Why is laughter such a powerful force in enforcing cruelty? My own perspectives about this were transformed after reading Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir, a psychoanalyst, a researcher and poet. Alsadir enrolled in clown college in order to write her treatise on the power of laughter and its ability to manipulate and transform, a process she found to be as useful a journey to the unconscious as analysis itself.
'For something to be funny, there has to be a violation, but the violation has to be benign in order for it to produce laughter,' Alsadir tells me over Zoom. 'You can't tickle yourself because you know what's happening. There's no violation, so it wouldn't make you laugh. Equally, if someone tickled you on the subway it would be a physical attack, and it wouldn't make you laugh. There has to be some violation, while there's also some form of safety.'
Whether at Cabaret, at the movie theatre or at the Trump-Tesla car show on the White House lawn, what we're really disputing is the degree to which the violation is benign. Is Anora so madcap and silly that even its violent scenes are ridiculous? Is Trump merely being facetious when he vows at a rally he's 'only' going to be a dictator on day one (a line that received – potentially nervous – laughter when it came from Trump on a Fox News town hall)?
But things become more complicated when you're not only reacting personally to a violation, but hearing others laugh about it.
Freud employed the concept of 'smut' to explain how an derogatory or violent act can be reframed as just a dirty joke, says Alsadir. 'Freud essentially has three figures. There's the person making the joke, and there's the target of what he says. Then there's the bystander. The joke is being told for the pleasure of the bystander, and that pleasure has to do with the degradation, or discomfort even, of the target.'
If there were no bystander, and someone said something hostile or sexually aggressive, it would be considered a verbal attack. 'But with the third party presence, it creates a kind of structure where it poses as a benign violation. There's a witness, so it's not supposed to truly be what it might have seemed if it were just happening between two people. There's a semblance of safety.'
For smut to be an effective way of reframing violence, there has to be a disconcerting combination of violence and fun. This is the way Trump and his acolytes use comedy, as an attempt to lower the stakes. To joke about being a dictator is silly and anyone who doesn't get the joke is a bore. The bystander is his crowd of supporters and acolytes, laughing at the joke. And the victim is the rest of us that don't see the funny side, suffering not just his abuse but also our humiliation.
Trump is not the first authoritarian leader to use laughter to change perspectives and redefine norms. Under Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi ministry of propaganda made more than 1,200 feature films. These included militaristic dramas and fake documentaries, a small number of which were explicitly antisemitic. But about half of the films produced were comedies.
'They look like bad Hollywood knockoffs,' says Valerie Weinstein, an expert in Nazi propaganda and the comedy films produced by the Third Reich. Most are not explicitly antisemitic, 'but in none of them do you see that there's a war going on, that there are shortages. They're existing in this sort of fantasy.'
The Nazis also had theories of what counted as Jewish humor, which they wanted to eradicate from German culture. 'They were intent on taking out irony, wit, intellectualism – most of the stuff that makes comedy funny – so all you got left is insipid situation comedy. Goebbels ruined comedy for decades in German cinema.'
The impact of European antisemitic propaganda can still be felt on Broadway, Cravalho says. In another moment in Cabaret that has prompted laughter that makes Cravalho uncomfortable is when Fräulein Kost says: 'They have all the money – the Jews.'
'A high school group in our audience, just a few days ago, could just not contain their giggles at that. It is really interesting that can still elicit that kind of response from teenagers, who are still giggling at the remains of the propaganda of nearly 100 years ago,' Cravalho says.
Weinstein recognises a similar impulse in the Nazi propagandists and Trump to use comedy as a way of making fascism more enjoyable for those participating in it.
'​​Melodrama is a much more effective propaganda tool than comedy, and the Nazis did make fake documentaries that just blast out how horrible the Jews are. But people don't really want to go to the movies to watch that. It's not fun, it's not funny. So Goebbels orchestrated a whole propaganda mission. Not just the blunt, hateful stuff but subtle, 'come out and hang out with all your blonde, Aryan friends' stuff.
'We see that in the rightwing media environment now, there's this sense of building community, creating a common language, a common humor, a feeling of belonging in some places, and it is definitely hooked to the nationalism, the hatred, the racism, biases and transphobia,' Weinstein continues.
Trump himself credits his electoral success to his relentless courting of comedians like Theo Von and Hinchcliffe – and he made more campaign stops at UFC fights and to speak to gen Z podcasters than he gave interviews to reputable newspapers. His appearances where then memed and clipped hundreds of times, often by Trump campaign accounts. Like Goebbels, he orchestrated a whole symphony of propaganda, with laughter taking as much of a role as fearmongering.
The performers in Cabaret are not the first to worry that people are laughing at the wrong joke. Many satirists, particularly Jewish and Black comics, have had to wrestle with the uncomfortable feeling that their audience might not be getting it. When Andrew Dice Clay, portrayed by the Jewish comic Andrew Silverstein, rose to superstardom in the 1980s, much of his audience seemed unaware that the character was intended as a sexist, homophobic send-up of 1950s greaser delinquents. When arenas of rightwing fans were screaming his screeds back to him, any sense of parody evaporated. Silverstein himself seemed to embrace vulgar humor with increasing sincerity, and rarely appears out of character now.
Dave Chappelle quit the comedy industry for decades after hearing a white crew member laughing during the taping of a sketch for which Chappelle was dressed in minstrel attire, later saying: 'He knew the difference of someone laughing with me and laughing at me.' Stephen Colbert played a rightwing news host called Stephen Colbert during the 2000s; focus group after focus group showed that the character was popular with Republicans who didn't realize it was satire. Sacha Baron Cohen's immensely popular character Borat made repeated antisemitic jokes. Can we assume that every viewer in the packed multiplexes across the US were laughing because they knew that Jewish Cohen was satirizing American xenophobia about foreign cultures?
But while it's true that not every laugh these comics earned came from someone in on the joke, it's also true that not every laugh was a sign that something was funny. 'Sometimes people can be primed to listen to something in a certain mood and the real meaning only reaches them after they've laughed,' says Alsadir. 'When Chris Rock made a joke about Will Smith's wife at the Oscars you could see that initially Smith struck a jovial laughing posture and then got upset.'
She says that while she hasn't seen this particular production of Cabaret, something similar might be going on. 'There's a timing issue at play. That joke has a delay. It's sort of like when [someone says] you're pretty and then you feel the pleasure of having received a compliment. And then they say, NOT. In Cabaret you might be receiving one frame in historical discourse and think it's meant genuinely. But then they shift the frame. The good feeling is actually the punchline, what makes it a joke is your exposure.'
When I speak with Alsadir she suggests that one idea about why laughter is so chilling comes from the American social theorist Michael Warner. Warner says you become part of a public by virtue of giving something your attention. 'If you give your attention to, say, a racist comedy performance, you become part of the public that watches those performances. That says something about the person next to you, but about you as well because you're part of that public. And maybe that's what's so anxiety-provoking about being in an audience where someone is laughing at something offensive: you are together, part of the same imagined public. Perhaps even if you watch something on your laptop, at a different time than it airs, by virtue of giving it your attention, Warner would say you become identified with what is happening in that space.'
That's one of the hardest things to reckon with in this era of cruelty – not only its perverse campness, but the sense that simply by watching we are part of the space. Many of us have said privately at some point in the last decade that we find Trump funny, but when our neighbours laugh at him it makes us uncomfortable, because we don't know exactly what it is they're laughing at. When cruelty becomes a carnival, everyone in the tent is condemned, whether they're laughing or not.
Still, if laughter can change the meaning of what happens in a room, then it means that audiences have power. They are not just bystanders, but an active congregation. The night I saw Cabaret the crowd was in fact deathly silent as If You Could See Her was being performed.
But there was a moment of spontaneous outburst, when Clifford Bradshaw tells Sally: 'Don't you understand if you're not against all this you're for it.' People were propelled to their feet in a minute of applause, something Cravalho says only started happening after Trump became president. 'Our audience has almost changed and clued in,' she says. 'They clap at different times now, which I can only believe is due to the change in politics.'