The power of fun (Daniel Inman, 15 September, 2025, The Critic)
What made Bakhtin so radical was his insistence that the comic and the grotesque reveal truths that are inaccessible to the institutions of solemn authority. In carnival laughter, the mask and the parody, he saw not an escape from reality but a deeper engagement with it. The “grotesque body”, as he described it — eating, drinking, laughing, exceeding its boundaries — stands in contrast to the polished, self-contained body of rulers and institutions. Through carnival, societies give voice to the unsayable, expose the temporary nature of all power, and remind themselves that no order is permanent — through laughter “the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint” (Rabelais and His World, Trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1984)), 66). The grotesque, in this sense, is not distasteful but positively subversive and regenerative. […]
Perhaps one of Bakhtin’s most unsettling insights, however, is that carnival never stays carnival for long. The laughter, parody, and inversion that once mocked authority always carry within them the seeds of their own ossification. Once victorious, the jesters so often become the judges: movements born in joyous defiance harden into new orthodoxies, policing their own rituals of seriousness with the very severity they once ridiculed and leaving those in authority struggling to understand the new terrain.