Overnight News: How do you slay a tyrant? With mockery.

Buck Phiden graced me with five new jokes this morning, in the first hour of my day – which starts for me sometime in the dead of the night. This is ephemera on ephemera, fleeting snark on a platform where I am already suppressed. Fun for me, which is all that matters, but a clinic for you, too, if you like, in how to write graffiti.

We think of it as Roman art – graffiti and satire itself – but the Loki joke is as old as Loki, and the best exemplar of Loki in classic lit is Homer’s Odysseus, whose canine presence here graces us with a joke of his own every day.

A joke has a seller (“Knock-knock”) and a buyer (“Who’s there?”). A Loki joke has a seller, a buyer and a target – and the joke consists of the unexpected pain inflicted on the unsuspecting target.

Graffiti is a Loki joke made anonymously, ideally against a powerful target. The power of the joke comes less from the underlying humor than from the risk of crossing the powerful. Accordingly, reading and especially reacting to graffiti is also risky – and, in that respect, anyone who is presumptively forbidden from laughing at graffiti is also the target of the joke.

But laughter is a mammal brain phenomenon. It races ahead of the thinking brain’s plodding clerical efforts, so a chuckle can slip out before studied propriety can suppress it. Knowing in detail that we are organisms does not make us not-organisms, so our failures at the suppression of irrepressible biology are funny, too.

If one man laughs at the wrong moment, it might cost him his job – or his life. If a nation laughs when it has been ordered not to – another dictatorship has fallen.

It took a while, but Odysseus won everything in the end – and, of course, the world ends and begins, over and over again, because of Loki and Sigyn. And Marxism in power is always a pageant of ineptitude, a bulging balloon of sanctified buffoonery: Humorless and ever at war with humor.

So take heart: The so-called ‘legitimacy’ of tyrants is just an idea – easily dispatched by the perfect joke.

In other news:

Clarice Feldman: Reality Bites Biden’s Policies.

The New York Post: Babies born during COVID-19 pandemic have lower IQs: Study says. A permanent drop of 20 IQ points would give Marxist environmentalists everything they want: Dumbfounded hunter-gatherers with no ability to scale an abstraction. Is this the ultimate goal of the germ warfare we’re living through?