Laugh! Laugh, bitches, laugh!

I love laughing. In private or public, in a group or alone, I laugh loudly and often. Understated or ridiculous doesn’t matter. Satirical, absurd, surreal; droll, witty, erudite; rude, puerile, disrespectful—these jokes all make me laugh my head off.

But I don’t laugh when a joke relies on stereotyping, bullying or meanness, or is said at the expense of some powerless group. Not because I don’t recognise the joke’s humour, not because I don’t find it funny. It’s because I stopped laughing down at people.

That doesn’t mean I only make ‘nice’ jokes. It means I want to be fair—and we’re not traditionally fair outside our understood group. Jokes can be funny while still being horrible: when the joke makes fun of prejudice instead of laughing at a prejudged group. But does that trick our expectations or just feed into happy superiority? It’s a difficult thing to judge…best left to professionals.

But there’s another, easy way, too: laughing up. Laughing at institutions—bosses and governments, the 1%, the banks, established religions, television—and mocking the powerful for what they’re powerful for…bring together those who aren’t powerful rather than taking the weak down even further.

Laugh up and the 99% laugh with you. Laugh down and you imitate Donald Trump.

And really, one of him is one too many.