‘The cause of laughter,” Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “ is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.” Laughter can be inherently subversive, a debunking of the status quo, a bursting of the bubble of convention and hypocrisy, a poke in the eye of authority.
But in women is it also indecent, a threat to the moral order? Turkey's deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc thinks so. Provoking uproar in a speech to mark the end of Ramadan, he told women this week not to laugh in the street to "protect moral values". "A woman should be chaste," he said. "She should know the difference between public and private. She should not laugh in public. She should protect her honour."
Thousands of women have responded by posting their smiling, even laughing, faces online, the first smile-in protest in history, many angrily denouncing Arinc’s comments as another patriarchal attempt to keep Turkish women in their place – veiled and in the home, demure, self-effacing, not drawing attention to themselves. Only speaking when spoken to?
It's not untypical for a government whose leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan once boasted to women's groups that "I don't believe in equality between men and women," and has spoken of women in political leadership as contrary to human nature, and of their responsibility to have at least three, preferably five, children. Last year, Turkey was rated 120 out of 136 countries in terms of gender gaps in education, health, politics and economics by the World Economic Forum.
Arinc complains his words are being taken out of context, focusing on a small part of his speech in which he said he advised men and women to adopt “ethical behaviours”. Clearly men shouldn’t smile either. But he also said “I stand by my words” in reference to his wider speech, which he described as an effort to shine a light on the “degeneration in society”.
“Against the assault of laughter,” Mark Twain wrote, however, “nothing can stand.”