Make America Laugh Again with Maggie Hennefeld

Hosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) welcome Maggie Hennefeld (@magshenny) to the Superstructure podcast to discuss her essay, “Make America Laugh Again,” published in Minneapolis’s Star Tribune. Previously ridiculed, Kamala Harris’s signature laughter has emerged as an electrifying rallying cry for her last-minute candidacy for President of the United States. “Harris’ laughter has become a national symbol of collective healing,” Hennefeld argues, “affirming the powers of contagious joy to unite community across the bitter divisions of culture and identity. … [L]aughter is a lifeline for resistance against the global onslaught of authoritarian hate and fearmongering.” Analyzing the carnivalesque slogans and memes surrounding the Harris campaign, our conversation draws surprising parallels between feminist laughter in fin-de-siècle cinema and in contemporary online cultures. 

Maggie Hennefeld is a feminist scholar of silent cinema and professor in the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024) and Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, 2018). She is also co-curator of the four-disc DVD/Blu-ray set Cinema’s First Nasty Women. 

Music: "Yum" from "This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me" EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting