“Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds,” Viktor Frankl wrote in recalling the role of humor as a lifeline to sanity and survival in the Holocaust.

Humor is a fundamental human freedom: To laugh is to protect ourselves from all that dehumanizes us — tyranny and transactionalism, captivity and commodification. Humor is also fundamental to free societies, to freedom of thought, to democracy: To laugh together is to harmonize our deepest humanity.

Because humor is the art of surprise, it exists beyond the reach of — and is an antidote to — the artifices of predictive computation we mistake for intelligence.

In her altogether fantastic manifesto for breaking free from the prison of predictive technologies, Carissa Véliz argues that humor thrives in the same “spaces of indeterminacy” where creativity and innovation also thrive. (“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,’” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech.) With an eye to the emotional attunement of sharing laughter, Véliz considers the relationship between humor, democracy, and AI:

Our sense of humor is a dialogue, and when we delegate the conversation to AI, we lose the personal relationship with another human being. Democracy itself is a conversation. If we give up our seat at that table and give it to an AI, we will lose our voice.

Comedy is not inconsequential for democracy. Comedy sets the tone for freedom. It gives us courage. A documentary about comedy clubs in war-torn Ukraine reminds me that humor is not a luxury; it’s indispensable. “When I went to Sarajevo to a film festival,” Cleese says, “people were talking about the early ’90s, when Yugoslavia was falling apart. Sarajevo is down in a valley, and the Serbs were up in the hills throwing shells down, and telescopic snipers were shooting people crossing the street. And they told me that they had found an underground car park, had turned it into a cinema, and they would show comedies, including Monty Python, and they would laugh. When they came out, an hour and a half later, they felt better. Nothing had improved. But they were better able to deal with their situation.” Comedy can be an ally in our challenge to defy the odds.

Humor, like creativity, works by defying expectation. It is a felicitous violation of the norm. Societies thrive and progress by continually challenging the norm, the given, the status quo. Every revolution, every change in regime, is the story of turning the old order from terrible to laughable.