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This article turns to Hobbes’s theory of laughter to determine the role collective laughter plays in democratic politics. After examining the political themes in Hobbes’s various accounts of laughter as well as the appearances laughter makes in his political philosophy, I argue that the Hobbesian body politic is a laughing body politic at the moment of its foundation. The individuals who contract with one another to establish a commonwealth perform the same sudden, “vainglorious,” and counter-sovereign political enactment as the laughing individual in Hobbes. This notion of a “laughing body politic” illuminates how Hobbes—the philosophical champion of sovereign power—provides resources for theorizing the counter-sovereign, democratic possibilities of collective laughter today.

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In response to the recent rise of neofascist deployments of laughter and the failures of liberal and leftist laughter to successfully combat reactionary politics, many liberal and Nietzschean thinkers who once celebrated laughter now worry that it has run out of political steam. These “new agelasts” seek to limit laughter’s role in politics as a way of restoring its critical and emancipatory power. The Coda argues that this new discourse hinges on the same misunderstanding of the relation between laughter and politics that the previous chapters all seek to remedy: it is impossible to secure the polis from laughter because the polisdoes not exist apart from the gelōsthat helps constitute it. Those seeking to resist neofascist laughter should abandon the illusory and ultimately counter-productive goal of re-establishing limits between laughter and politics and instead engage today’s enormous quantity and variety of laughter as a unique, albeit danger-ridden opportunity to imagine and build new, more democratic ideologies, institutions, and forms of social life.