How Humor Can Help Inspire Change and (Sometimes) Revolutions Too

An Op-Ed from Nicholas Kristof suggests that humor can be a fundamental force for driving change, and asks the question of what we can learn from the pro-democracy movements in other countries. George Orwell wrote “every joke is a tiny revolution,” an idea that has new relevance today. “Cartoonists,” Kristof writes, “are often more incisive social and political critics than columnists.”

It’s a sentiment worth sitting with, particularly at a moment when so much of the sharpest political commentary seems to be arriving through jokes and drawings rather than through argument.