What’s in Kamala Harris’s laugh?
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Maura Judkis and Kara Voght
2024-07-31 09:00:00GMT
Vice President Harris laughs at 128 beats per minute — the same tempo as some truly excellent dance songs, such as “We Found Love” by Rihanna or Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam.” Which is why, after an unprecedented wave of viral content in support of Harris’s candidacy took over social media last week, music producer Leo Zarucky sat in his Melbourne, Australia, studio and recorded a remix.
It started with her now-famous “coconut tree” quote, interjected with her ebullient laugh. He dropped the beat. Each “ha” punctuated a thumping bass line that could get people out onto the floor in any club.
It’s “such a rhythmic-sounding laugh,” he says. “When I found the right BPM, it was actually, like, pretty much in time. I didn’t need to alter it.”
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, comedian Allison Reese stood before a fake White House backdrop in a blazer, wig and pearls, and let out an impression of the candidate’s distinctive peal of laughter. As a Harris impressionist on TikTok, Reese has probably spent more time thinking about that laugh than the candidate herself. It’s a little higher in the throat, but not breathy. There’s a cadence to it. It’s melodic, but within a tight range of notes.
“It’s like she’s surprised at the laugh,” Reese says. “It feels more uninhibited. … The laugh is truly coming from this place of inner joy.”
Harris’s laugh has become one of the candidate’s most defining and most dissected personal traits, for better or for worse. Social media crowned her the de facto queen of IJBOL — “I just burst out laughing,” a descendant of LOL (laugh out loud) and ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing). Her chuckles are all over the internet: At first, in conservative-produced supercuts of her laughing repeatedly, meant to paint her as wacky or unhinged. But those have been superseded by flattering fan videos adding her laugh to pop songs, emphasizing it as a thing to be celebrated, a trait that makes the candidate warm and human and, well, funny.
Forget choosing a candidate based on whether you can have a beer with them, a trope often expressed during the 2000 election cycle.
“She seems like a politician I could sit down and have a laugh with,” Reese says. “That’s something I want in somebody leading our country: Somebody who embraces their humanity.”
But before we talk about any of that, we need to talk about why everyone’s talking about her laugh. And why they aren’t overanalyzing and meme-ing the laughs of any of the male politicians running for office this cycle.
You can probably guess why.
“It’s been taboo for women to speak too loud, to laugh too loud, to laugh too much,” says Kathleen Karlyn, a scholar of cinema and media studies. “It’s predictable that, when Kamala laughs, she’s asserting her power and her refusal to be silent or play by these old rules about proper femininity.”
The laugh of a would-be woman president always raises the hackles of those who seek to knock her down. Hillary Clinton’s wide-mouthed, whole-body howls became known as the Clinton Cackle when she first ran for president in 2007. It erupted at confusing moments: during an exchange about Iran on the debate stage, and when she was asked about her health-care plan on the Sunday morning talk shows. Critics called it calculated; advisers explained that it was a way to respond without seeming guarded or sharp.
“You guys keep telling me, lighten up, be fun,” Clinton told reporters on the trail with her in Iowa in January 2007. “Now I get a little funny, and I’m being psychoanalyzed.”
“It’s how women have been sullied — how women have been demeaned as leaders in our society,” says Donna Brazile, the veteran political strategist who has previously led the Democratic National Committee.
It has been 17 years, but the playbook remains the same. Harris’s Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump, floated a new nickname for the vice president — “Laughing Kamala” — at a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., earlier this month. “You ever watch her laugh?” Trump said. “ … You can tell a lot by a laugh. No — she’s crazy. She’s nuts.” Fox News personality Sean Hannity suggested this month that Harris’s laugh was a reason “voters seem to detest” her. The network played a supercut of Harris laughing alongside the chyron “Kamala’s awkward laugh turns off voters.” A memo of Harris’s negatives from the GOP’s Senate campaign committee noted — in a section titled “Weird” — that “Kamala Harris has a habit of laughing at inappropriate moments.”
National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson Mike Berg thinks the attacks are working, though he offered no data to back up the assertion. “You don’t need a poll to know that it turns off voters when Kamala Harris laughs at voter concerns,” he says.
“I have recommended that we ignore it as much as possible,” Brazile says of the laugh discourse. “Let the historians and the political scientists and the scholars talk about the treatment of women throughout our history.” Even the good vibes? “If people in the movement want to celebrate, then fine,” she says.
Why aren’t people talking about Trump laughing? Maybe it’s sexism. Or maybe because he doesn’t.
“I find it interesting that her laugh is more of a topic and subject other than his lack of emotion,” says Reese, the Harris impressionist. “I’ve never seen him laugh. Not even, like, polite chuckles.”
(Here, Reese proceeds to do an impression of what she imagines Trump’s laugh sounds like, which is similar to the noises made by Jurassic Park velociraptors.)
Trump’s lack of laughter sets him apart from most of his Oval Office predecessors. Bill Clinton guffawed. George W. Bush snickered. Barack Obama had a habit of cracking himself up with his own punchlines. President Biden, before his face turned rigid, flashed a sparkling grin with his soft chuckle. Trump, on the rare occasion that he registers humor, opts for a single, wide-mouthed “Ha!” (Like he did during the 2016 campaign, when someone, in response to his question about whether an animal in the crowd was a dog, shouted back, “It’s Hillary!”)
Mary L. Trump, his niece and an outspoken critic of his, speculated that it’s a family trait. Her grandfather, Donald’s father, didn’t laugh, either. “Laughing is to make yourself vulnerable, it’s to let down your guard in some way, it’s to lose a little bit of control,” she told Slate in 2020.
Conservatives seem to have lost control of the “Laughing Kamala” narrative that they tried to create. What they put forth as cringeworthy has been alchemized into coconutmentum. Whether you like it or not is in the ear of the beholder.
The use of the laugh in music has produced “a really interesting artistic and political ecosystem,” says Justin Patch, an associate professor at Vassar College who studies music in American politics. “Anybody can use it. If you love Kamala Harris, you can clip that laugh to do things that make her seem cool. If you hate Kamala Harris, you can clip that laugh and make her seem like Cruella de Vil.”
Or, if you’re Zarucky — an Australian who notes that he has no stake in the outcome of the U.S. election and did it “purely for the memes, for the laughs” — you can leave it up to the listeners to decide. He’s been watching the fans and haters duke it out in the comments.
“People will take it whatever way they want to,” he says.
Our responses to laughter say a lot more about us than about the person laughing, says Adrienne Wood, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. To those inclined to like Harris — namely, Democrats ready to elect her as president — her laughter is rewarding and builds an affinity between her and her fans. For those who are disinclined, they’re going to find her double-over cackles supremely annoying. “There’s always this feeling about others enjoying themselves when you don’t like them,” she says.
Wood compares it to what happens when a group of close friends goes out to dinner — after a few bottles of wine have been poured and everyone’s telling old stories. “If you’re at that dinner table, it’s going to feel amazing,” Wood says. “If you’re at the table over and there’s a group of people laughing their heads off, you’re going to feel a different way about it.”
And Harris’s particular laugh could be especially triggering to critics, Wood adds. “People in a position of status and power have a disinhibited laugh — they laugh more, bigger, louder,” Wood says. “Part of the reason why people have a negative reaction to her is that she has the status to take up space, to be disinhibited.”
Disgust is a powerful political mechanism, says Kate Manne, a philosopher at Cornell University. She wrote in her 2017 book about how conservatives weaponized Hillary Clinton’s laugh during the 2016 campaign, transforming mild pangs of ick into harsh criticisms of her morality. But “voters are savvier this time around,” Manne says. Less than two weeks into Harris’s candidacy, “we’ve seen misogyny, racism, but we’re also seeing people being smarter than they were in 2016.”
Harris seems to be in on the joke, too, owning her outbursts as a proud part of her origin story. “Let me just tell you something: I have my mother’s laugh,” Harris told Drew Barrymore on the actress’s talk show in spring. “And I grew up around a bunch of women, in particular, who laughed from the belly. They laughed. They would sit around the kitchen and drinking their coffee, telling big stories with big laughs.”
“You know I’m never going to be — ” Harris paused and impersonated a pearl-clutching giggle — “I’m just not that person.”
Laughter, scientists and sociologists have found, is an incredibly complex and deft communicator. In studying Harris’s, Reese believes it is an “energetic release.” It’s “not like ‘I’m laughing at’” something. “It’s like an ‘I’m enjoying this moment’ kind of a thing.”
And there’s a reason people are hearing music in her voice: It’s a melodic laugh, and the “coconut tree” laugh has a syncopated beat. Zarucky’s music production software identified a common note in her laugh to be a B-flat.
That means Harris’s natural laugh tone also matches the kind of music she likes to listen to. In her frequent stops at record stores over the years, Harris has been spotted buying records by Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and Ella Fitzgerald.
“The jazz repertoire,” says Patch, the musicologist. “You’ll find a lot of B-flats in there.”
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Maura Judkis and Kara Voght
2024-07-31 09:00:00GMT
Vice President Harris laughs at 128 beats per minute — the same tempo as some truly excellent dance songs, such as “We Found Love” by Rihanna or Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam.” Which is why, after an unprecedented wave of viral content in support of Harris’s candidacy took over social media last week, music producer Leo Zarucky sat in his Melbourne, Australia, studio and recorded a remix.
It started with her now-famous “coconut tree” quote, interjected with her ebullient laugh. He dropped the beat. Each “ha” punctuated a thumping bass line that could get people out onto the floor in any club.
It’s “such a rhythmic-sounding laugh,” he says. “When I found the right BPM, it was actually, like, pretty much in time. I didn’t need to alter it.”
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, comedian Allison Reese stood before a fake White House backdrop in a blazer, wig and pearls, and let out an impression of the candidate’s distinctive peal of laughter. As a Harris impressionist on TikTok, Reese has probably spent more time thinking about that laugh than the candidate herself. It’s a little higher in the throat, but not breathy. There’s a cadence to it. It’s melodic, but within a tight range of notes.
“It’s like she’s surprised at the laugh,” Reese says. “It feels more uninhibited. … The laugh is truly coming from this place of inner joy.”
Harris’s laugh has become one of the candidate’s most defining and most dissected personal traits, for better or for worse. Social media crowned her the de facto queen of IJBOL — “I just burst out laughing,” a descendant of LOL (laugh out loud) and ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing). Her chuckles are all over the internet: At first, in conservative-produced supercuts of her laughing repeatedly, meant to paint her as wacky or unhinged. But those have been superseded by flattering fan videos adding her laugh to pop songs, emphasizing it as a thing to be celebrated, a trait that makes the candidate warm and human and, well, funny.
Forget choosing a candidate based on whether you can have a beer with them, a trope often expressed during the 2000 election cycle.
“She seems like a politician I could sit down and have a laugh with,” Reese says. “That’s something I want in somebody leading our country: Somebody who embraces their humanity.”
But before we talk about any of that, we need to talk about why everyone’s talking about her laugh. And why they aren’t overanalyzing and meme-ing the laughs of any of the male politicians running for office this cycle.
You can probably guess why.
“It’s been taboo for women to speak too loud, to laugh too loud, to laugh too much,” says Kathleen Karlyn, a scholar of cinema and media studies. “It’s predictable that, when Kamala laughs, she’s asserting her power and her refusal to be silent or play by these old rules about proper femininity.”
The laugh of a would-be woman president always raises the hackles of those who seek to knock her down. Hillary Clinton’s wide-mouthed, whole-body howls became known as the Clinton Cackle when she first ran for president in 2007. It erupted at confusing moments: during an exchange about Iran on the debate stage, and when she was asked about her health-care plan on the Sunday morning talk shows. Critics called it calculated; advisers explained that it was a way to respond without seeming guarded or sharp.
“You guys keep telling me, lighten up, be fun,” Clinton told reporters on the trail with her in Iowa in January 2007. “Now I get a little funny, and I’m being psychoanalyzed.”
“It’s how women have been sullied — how women have been demeaned as leaders in our society,” says Donna Brazile, the veteran political strategist who has previously led the Democratic National Committee.
It has been 17 years, but the playbook remains the same. Harris’s Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump, floated a new nickname for the vice president — “Laughing Kamala” — at a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., earlier this month. “You ever watch her laugh?” Trump said. “ … You can tell a lot by a laugh. No — she’s crazy. She’s nuts.” Fox News personality Sean Hannity suggested this month that Harris’s laugh was a reason “voters seem to detest” her. The network played a supercut of Harris laughing alongside the chyron “Kamala’s awkward laugh turns off voters.” A memo of Harris’s negatives from the GOP’s Senate campaign committee noted — in a section titled “Weird” — that “Kamala Harris has a habit of laughing at inappropriate moments.”
National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson Mike Berg thinks the attacks are working, though he offered no data to back up the assertion. “You don’t need a poll to know that it turns off voters when Kamala Harris laughs at voter concerns,” he says.
“I have recommended that we ignore it as much as possible,” Brazile says of the laugh discourse. “Let the historians and the political scientists and the scholars talk about the treatment of women throughout our history.” Even the good vibes? “If people in the movement want to celebrate, then fine,” she says.
Why aren’t people talking about Trump laughing? Maybe it’s sexism. Or maybe because he doesn’t.
“I find it interesting that her laugh is more of a topic and subject other than his lack of emotion,” says Reese, the Harris impressionist. “I’ve never seen him laugh. Not even, like, polite chuckles.”
(Here, Reese proceeds to do an impression of what she imagines Trump’s laugh sounds like, which is similar to the noises made by Jurassic Park velociraptors.)
Trump’s lack of laughter sets him apart from most of his Oval Office predecessors. Bill Clinton guffawed. George W. Bush snickered. Barack Obama had a habit of cracking himself up with his own punchlines. President Biden, before his face turned rigid, flashed a sparkling grin with his soft chuckle. Trump, on the rare occasion that he registers humor, opts for a single, wide-mouthed “Ha!” (Like he did during the 2016 campaign, when someone, in response to his question about whether an animal in the crowd was a dog, shouted back, “It’s Hillary!”)
Mary L. Trump, his niece and an outspoken critic of his, speculated that it’s a family trait. Her grandfather, Donald’s father, didn’t laugh, either. “Laughing is to make yourself vulnerable, it’s to let down your guard in some way, it’s to lose a little bit of control,” she told Slate in 2020.
Conservatives seem to have lost control of the “Laughing Kamala” narrative that they tried to create. What they put forth as cringeworthy has been alchemized into coconutmentum. Whether you like it or not is in the ear of the beholder.
The use of the laugh in music has produced “a really interesting artistic and political ecosystem,” says Justin Patch, an associate professor at Vassar College who studies music in American politics. “Anybody can use it. If you love Kamala Harris, you can clip that laugh to do things that make her seem cool. If you hate Kamala Harris, you can clip that laugh and make her seem like Cruella de Vil.”
Or, if you’re Zarucky — an Australian who notes that he has no stake in the outcome of the U.S. election and did it “purely for the memes, for the laughs” — you can leave it up to the listeners to decide. He’s been watching the fans and haters duke it out in the comments.
“People will take it whatever way they want to,” he says.
Our responses to laughter say a lot more about us than about the person laughing, says Adrienne Wood, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. To those inclined to like Harris — namely, Democrats ready to elect her as president — her laughter is rewarding and builds an affinity between her and her fans. For those who are disinclined, they’re going to find her double-over cackles supremely annoying. “There’s always this feeling about others enjoying themselves when you don’t like them,” she says.
Wood compares it to what happens when a group of close friends goes out to dinner — after a few bottles of wine have been poured and everyone’s telling old stories. “If you’re at that dinner table, it’s going to feel amazing,” Wood says. “If you’re at the table over and there’s a group of people laughing their heads off, you’re going to feel a different way about it.”
And Harris’s particular laugh could be especially triggering to critics, Wood adds. “People in a position of status and power have a disinhibited laugh — they laugh more, bigger, louder,” Wood says. “Part of the reason why people have a negative reaction to her is that she has the status to take up space, to be disinhibited.”
Disgust is a powerful political mechanism, says Kate Manne, a philosopher at Cornell University. She wrote in her 2017 book about how conservatives weaponized Hillary Clinton’s laugh during the 2016 campaign, transforming mild pangs of ick into harsh criticisms of her morality. But “voters are savvier this time around,” Manne says. Less than two weeks into Harris’s candidacy, “we’ve seen misogyny, racism, but we’re also seeing people being smarter than they were in 2016.”
Harris seems to be in on the joke, too, owning her outbursts as a proud part of her origin story. “Let me just tell you something: I have my mother’s laugh,” Harris told Drew Barrymore on the actress’s talk show in spring. “And I grew up around a bunch of women, in particular, who laughed from the belly. They laughed. They would sit around the kitchen and drinking their coffee, telling big stories with big laughs.”
“You know I’m never going to be — ” Harris paused and impersonated a pearl-clutching giggle — “I’m just not that person.”
Laughter, scientists and sociologists have found, is an incredibly complex and deft communicator. In studying Harris’s, Reese believes it is an “energetic release.” It’s “not like ‘I’m laughing at’” something. “It’s like an ‘I’m enjoying this moment’ kind of a thing.”
And there’s a reason people are hearing music in her voice: It’s a melodic laugh, and the “coconut tree” laugh has a syncopated beat. Zarucky’s music production software identified a common note in her laugh to be a B-flat.
That means Harris’s natural laugh tone also matches the kind of music she likes to listen to. In her frequent stops at record stores over the years, Harris has been spotted buying records by Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and Ella Fitzgerald.
“The jazz repertoire,” says Patch, the musicologist. “You’ll find a lot of B-flats in there.”
