When a 😂 Isn’t Funny

The laugh emoji as contempt, not levity

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First: A Note to My Subscribers

I’ve been thinking about how I want to shape this Substack. For a long time, I’ve felt like I had to wait until I had a long, weighty essay ready before I could publish. The truth is, I’ve always written shorter reflections like the one you’re about to read—pieces that draw from my knowledge base and spin out a theoretical backdrop for something that strikes me in the moment. My subscribership has been growing, and I don’t want to keep you waiting between big essays. I want to use these shorter posts as a way to connect with you, to share thoughts in real time and hear from you as well. Think of it as a kind of “midnight musing” series—looser, more conversational, but still thoughtful. I hope you enjoy it, and I’d love for you to let me know what you think so we can build this together.

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Now …

Picture this: you’ve just laid out a careful argument in a serious discussion. Instead of responding with substance, the other person replies with a dismissive comment capped by a laugh emoji. Not a genuine laugh—an undermining one. It lands like a smirk, a quick signal that your point isn’t worth engaging.

Do you recognize that? Have you ever felt undermined by someone who uses a laugh emoji not to share humor, but to signal disdain for you and your view? That moment where the emoji isn’t playful at all—it’s punitive, a shorthand for “you’re ridiculous” or “I don’t have to take you seriously.”

That kind of use fascinates me because it reveals more than people realize. To me, it represents an incapacity—or at least an unwillingness—to sit with the ambiguity that difficult discussions bring. When we encounter ideas that destabilize us emotionally or cognitively, our mental framework can wobble. Some people regulate that dissonance by engaging, reflecting, and integrating. Others collapse quickly, resorting to shortcuts like logical fallacies, rigid biases, and mocking dismissal. The laugh emoji, in this context, is a perfect example of the latter.

A core component of meaningful dialogue is metacognition: the ability to monitor one’s own thoughts, weigh them against new information, and operate at a level “above” both one’s worldview and the other’s. That process requires cognitive energy and emotional regulation. Without the ability to regulate the autonomic nervous system when faced with threatening or dissonant information, higher-order reasoning circuits go offline. Kahneman’s System 1 vs. System 2 distinction is useful here: the challenge is flagged as threat, reflective reasoning disengages, and the person defaults to fast, emotional discharge. In this light, the laugh emoji isn’t levity—it’s avoidance, a shorthand refusal to process the discomfort of contradiction.

There’s also a characterological layer. Some people deploy humor not to defuse tension but to assert contempt. Research on antagonism and dark personality traits suggests that mocking humor and ridicule are common strategies for people who prefer dominance over dialogue. In that sense, the laugh emoji becomes a digital smirk: “you don’t deserve respect, and I want you to know it.”

All of this makes the laugh emoji an intriguing window into personality style. Some of this is empirically substantiated—studies show emojis are used to signal sarcasm, shade criticism, or dismiss with contempt. Much of my framing here is theoretical, pieced together from converging evidence on emotion regulation, ambiguity intolerance, and antagonism. But the hypothesis is clear: laugh-emoji use in antagonistic contexts may mark deficits in cognitive monitoring, intolerance of ambiguity, or simply an antagonistic interpersonal stance.

That raises a pragmatic question: if someone’s modus operandi is to laugh at others online whenever they encounter dissonance, what does that say about them offline? Do they repress the same impulses? Do they act out? Do they cover contempt with humor? These are not idle curiosities but cues worth tracking in interpersonal encounters, especially with people we don’t yet know well.

If, during a discussion, you’re not experiencing something mutual—something bidirectional—and it becomes clear that the other person is using levity to dismiss you, or is dressing their maliciousness up as humor, that’s a different matter entirely. True humor is not that. True humor is a deeper connection: it signals that unspoken recognition between people, the moment of shared understanding that tickles both at once. It has a pro-social quality, whether it comes through playful banter, mutual teasing, or even self-deprecation. Dismissiveness masquerading as humor, by contrast, has no such reciprocity. It’s a one-sided maneuver that deflects, trivializes, and allows the person wielding it to avoid discomfort. And in online exchanges, especially, where there’s no social cost to this kind of behavior, it’s become far easier to deploy. That lack of consequence robs us of the discomfort that, in a face-to-face setting, might press us toward a more honest exchange—one that elevates perspective rather than undermines it.

Have you noticed this in your own conversations? How do you respond when someone tries to dismiss you with humor instead of engaging your point?