What is the proper place of humor—especially ridicule—in politics? Does ridicule damage the fabric of social life by making some individuals or groups the unfortunate targets of mirth? Can it, conversely, strengthen bonds via shared laughter that travels across the differences that separate us? Politically, is ridicule a tool that can be used to dismantle hierarchies and challenge those with power? Or does it merely reinforce hierarchies and humiliate the already vulnerable? These questions are at the heart of Ross Carroll’s Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain. In his excellent monograph, Carroll wisely avoids any attempt to settle these questions definitively. Instead, through meticulous historical and interpretive work, he demonstrates their vital political significance to eighteenth-century thinkers and suggests that we, too, would do well to think critically about the potential uses and abuses of ridicule in our own contexts.

In Uncivil Mirth, Carroll accomplishes several difficult tasks at once. First, he offers readers a new narrative about the shape of British political thought in the long eighteenth century by centering debates about humor. Through careful research, he highlights how debates about the uses and abuses of humor and laughter were at the core of political disputes in early modern Britain—those over religious difference and toleration, the abolition of slavery, and the persistence of entrenched social hierarchies, including but not limited to patriarchy. Second, Carroll takes well-known figures in the history of British political thought—such as Thomas Hobbes; Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury; David Hume; and Mary Wollstonecraft—and by guiding the reader through their subtle, complicated engagements with the problem of humor, offers novel interpretations of their political writing. In other words, he makes these familiar writers unfamiliar again. At the same time, Uncivil Mirth also shines a welcome spotlight on political thinkers and movements that are, unfortunately, less well known to many political theorists: the Aberdonian “common sense” philosophers, whose theories of humor challenged both Humean skepticism and the structure of group relations in commercial society; and the Scottish abolitionists, who weighed whether ridicule ought to replace reasoned argument as an effective means of highlighting the inhumane cruelty of the Atlantic slave trade. Last, Carroll notes that although the eighteenth-century debate on the political role of humor sparked by Shaftesbury’s (and to a great degree, Hobbes’s) reflections “has long petered out, the problems that inspired it are still very much with us” (p. 214). We, too, must focus our attention on both the “style and content” of political humor and critically evaluate how it operates for better or worse ends in our politics (p. 215).

In a short review, it is impossible to do justice to the full scope of a rich study such as Uncivil Mirth, which interprets well-known moral and political treatises alongside letters, pamphlets, and ephemera to make its case for vibrant eighteenth-century British engagement with the morality and politics of humor. Different readers—depending on their scholarly interests—are likely to find themselves especially captivated by particular chapters of Carroll’s book. For this reader, the chapters on the Scottish abolitionists and Wollstonecraft were the most gripping. From an interpretive standpoint, they show how arguments about the place of wit, humor, and laughter instantiated by earlier figures such as Hobbes and Shaftesbury are stretched, molded, and fitted to specific debates that arise later in British political history. In some sense, then, these two chapters constitute both the conclusion and the apex of Carroll’s story in Uncivil Mirth. They also illuminate an argument that Carroll stresses throughout his account of Enlightenment Britain: it is really an open question whether the rhetorical and political practice of ridicule can support emancipatory political projects and choosing whether to employ it is, therefore, a matter of context-dependent political judgment. Each of these two chapters features this argument in a different way.

Chapter 5 interprets the work of Scottish polemicists who, although dissimilar in their backgrounds, careers, and general political leanings, were all keen to “[deploy] ridicule against what they took to be the gravest of social evils: the European enslavement of Africans” (p. 151). Taking their cue from the notoriously ironical chapter on slavery in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, these polemicists—among them, James Ramsey, William Dickson, James Tytler, and Alexander Geddes—marshaled the forces of biting irony and satire to stage a rhetorical intervention on behalf of abolition, in contrast to some of the more sober moral and religious arguments offered by their allies in the cause. Carroll deftly works through their complicated polemics (not the least of which is Tytler’s clever and startling 1792 satire “Petition of the Sharks of Africa to the House of Commons”) to lay bare the genuine risks of deploying ridicule to confront the most urgent moral and political questions. On the one hand, claims and arguments in favor of slavery were deemed by many to be too morally abhorrent to dignify an in-kind response in the form of a reasoned counterargument. Enter ridicule, another potential means of destabilizing the status quo, via ironical send-ups of different arguments for the continuation of the slave trade. On the other hand, as a political tactic, satirizing proslavery arguments and polemics carried some specific dangers. As Carroll points out, some abolitionists worried that readers would either unintentionally mistake or purposefully misrepresent satirical tracts as serious arguments for perpetuating the enslavement and trading of African people. Furthermore, the turn to satire posed another risk: weaponizing humor to fight the so-called arguments offered by the proslavery side could belie the absolute moral seriousness of the issue at hand (p. 154). Working through the double-edged nature of ridicule in the context of the abolition debates, Carroll shows both its promise and limitations for addressing the most serious political problems. It has the potential to serve as a form of refusal, an outright rejection of the basic terms of a political debate. And yet, ridicule may also be easily claimed by the side it aims to contest and then coopted in service of the very projects that its authors reject.

Carroll’s chapter on Wollstonecraft continues some of the themes of his chapter on the Scottish abolitionists—namely, the idea that ridicule might be used to unseat entrenched prejudices. Here, Carroll takes on a perceived double standard some interpreters find in Wollstonecraft’s work: in her critiques of Edmund Burke, she faults him for ridiculing his opponents rather than treating them with respect, and yet, in her opposition to Burke’s arguments, she leads off by heaping contempt and ridicule on him. How can these two moves be reconciled? Carroll works through this (only apparent) inconsistency by reexamining Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre and coming to the persuasive conclusion that although she always held some qualms about ridicule, she also came to endorse it as a means of reversing the usual pathway traveled by contempt, from the powerful down to the vulnerable. Women and girls—the vulnerable parties she spent the most time thinking about—should learn to aim ridicule upward, by meeting the texts and writers who reinforced prejudices against them with contemptuous laughter. By learning to laugh at those who would degrade them, women and girls could take a first step toward cultivating the skills they would need to become independent social, political, and economic actors (p. 211).

By briefly reconstructing these two chapters of Uncivil Mirth, I wish to highlight the major contributions of Carroll’s work. In beautiful—and frequently witty—prose, he shows that ridicule was a widely used but contested rhetorical resource for thinkers and actors across the political spectrum in eighteenth-century Britain. The source materials he uses to make this case are sometimes unexpected and well chosen. Readers might assume that they would find Jonathan Swift or Bernard Mandeville as the most prominent figures in a study like this, but Carroll keeps them largely in the background in favor of devoting more consideration to rich, multiauthor, Scottish debates about common life and pressing political controversies. Uncivil Mirth will repay careful attention from political theorists, intellectual historians, and scholars of rhetoric who specialize in eighteenth-century political discourse. At the same time, and without slipping into anachronism, it sets a demanding agenda for contemporary politics: figuring out how to harness the undeniable force of ridicule for emancipatory political purposes while keeping close watch on its potential to undermine the very same ends.