Long before Kamala Harris was running to be president of the United States, Mark Buell noticed that she had a certain anxious tic.
“[Harris] is very funny. She has a very good sense of humor, and when she enjoys herself, she has a very hearty laugh,” recalls the San Francisco real estate developer and Democratic donor, who was one of Harris’s earliest political patrons, in an interview with The Independent.
But back then, he says, when she was nervous “that laugh became more prominent… so between the two, it would show up sometimes at inappropriate times”.
Two decades later, Donald Trump and other conservatives are trying to use Harris’s distinctive and frequent peals of whole-body laughter as an attack line, with the former president even adding “Laughing Kamala” to his notorious roster of nicknames.
“You ever watch her laugh? […] You can tell a lot by a laugh. She’s crazy. She’s nuts,” said Trump at a rally in Michigan last month.
According to Buell, that is no coincidence. He believes that someone tipped Trump or his team off about Harris’s old habit, and – “in keeping with Trump’s approach to politics, looking for weaknesses and faults in people” – he went after it.
Yet old friends and allies claim that Harris’s sense of humour is one of her most appealing characteristics, and a sign of her genuine willingness to connect with other people emotionally.
Indeed, on TikTok Harris’s laughter has become one of the most-memed sounds of the 2024 election, endlessly and affectionately remixed by superfans, comedians, and dance musicians.
“I don’t know that I have any memory of, quote, ‘the laugh’, which Republicans have used as a weapon against her since she became VP,” says Mark Leno, a former California state legislator who has been friends with Harris since the mid-Nineties. “But it does speak to her vivaciousness, her energy, her love of life, her passion. And I think it’s terrific that it has now been turned around to be an asset.”
‘It bubbles up, and sometimes it gets loud’
When Donna Sachet first met Kamala Harris in 2003, one of the first things she noticed was the way she laughed.
“Yes, it’s the same laugh,” the now fifty-something LGBT+ activist and drag performer tells The Independent. “It bubbles up, and sometimes it gets kind of loud.”
Sachet got to know her during Harris’s (victorious) campaign to be district attorney of San Francisco, challenging an eight-year incumbent. Leno, a mutual friend, had suggested she help raise funds for Harris, sparking a friendship that lasted through all her subsequent campaigns and into the present day.
“Politics – to me, as I was beginning to get involved in it – seemed very dry. Some of the speeches would go on and on,” says Sachet. “But she often had humor in her speeches, and if you made a joke and she found it funny, she laughed fully, she laughed boisterously.
“We had fun with it. She would even sometimes cover her mouth and say, ‘Oh, I’m being too loud!’”
Sachet adds that they would often discuss fashion together, complimenting each other’s outfits and comparing heel heights (Harris’s shoes tended to be slightly lower, since she had to wear them throughout the day).
Leno, in turn, had first met Harris in 1995 through her then boyfriend Willie Brown’s campaign to be mayor of San Francisco. After the pair broke up in 1996, Leno and Harris became deeper friends, accompanying each other to the San Francisco Symphony – a strictly platonic date, since Leno is gay.
“The Kamala I see on the national and international stage today is no different from the woman who befriended me almost 30 years ago,” he says.
Harris herself appears happy to make laughter part of her brand, proudly telling the actor and TV host Drew Barrymore back in May – admittedly an aeon ago in this election – that she has her mother’s laugh.
“Apparently some people love to talk about my laugh,” she said. “Let me just tell you something… I grew up around a bunch of women in particular, who laughed from the belly. They laughed. They would sit around the kitchen drinking their coffee, telling big stories with big laughs.”
She went on: “You know, I’m never gonna be…” Then she covered her mouth demurely and gave an exaggeratedly feminine giggle. “I’m just not that person! And I think it’s really important for us to remind each other, and our younger ones: Don’t be confined to other people’s perceptions about… how you should act in order to be, right?”
Today, Buell contends that Harris has lost her old habit of laughing when she is nervous. “That’s long past, and she’s matured out of it,” he says.
But that hasn’t stopped her opponents from honing in on it.
‘She’s running against a man with no sense of humour’
Donald Trump has been trying to make this attack stick for several years. As early as October 2020, at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, he said: “Is there something wrong with her? She kept laughing at, you know, very serious questions.”
In 2021, right-leaning news outlets such as The New York Post and Mail Online reported on Harris’s seemingly nervous laughter when confronted by journalists asking about the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan as she boarded a jet to Singapore.
In 2022, Republicans also criticised Harris for laughing during a press conference about the war in Ukraine, with Ukrainian-American GOP state legislator Victoria Spartz calling it “a very serious situation” and “not a laughing matter”.
The implication of these criticisms tends to be that Harris doesn’t treat her job, or the lives and welfare of the millions of people affected by her decisions in office, with sufficient gravity. In other words, that it’s all a joke to her.
This year, Trump’s allies and sympathetic pundits have warmed to the theme. The National Republican Senatorial Committee last month flagged up Harris’s “habit of laughing at inappropriate moments” as a potential weakness of her candidacy, while Fox News host Sean Hannity compiled a supercut of Harris’s laughter, which he said made voters “detest” her.
In fact, one of the very first YouTube uploads of Harris’s now-famous “coconut tree” remarks came from an official GOP account – apparently not anticipating how enthusiastically her words would be adopted by her “coconut-pilled” supporters.
Feminist academics and authors have argued that this smacks of misogyny and racism, saying that women – and especially women of color – are often harshly policed over the minutiae of their emotional affect. Back in the Noughties, Hillary Clinton was similarly mocked for her “Clinton cackle”.
Many younger progressives say they feel charmed by Harris’s open expressions of levity.
“It’s like she’s surprised at the laugh,” said comedian Allison Reese, who is widely known on TikTok for her impressions of Harris, in an interview with The Washington Post. “It feels more uninhibited… the laugh is truly coming from this place of inner joy.”
All of which dovetails with the Democrats’ newfound strategy of painting Republicans less as dangerous would-be dictators, as Joe Biden did, but as “weird” and joyless puritans, pruriently obsessed with other people’s private lives.
That line of attack is especially effective, Buell argues, because Donald Trump is someone who, despite his undeniable skill at making other people laugh, almost never laughs himself (at least in public).
“If you look at who she’s running against – a man who has no sense of humor – it’s a contrast,” says Buell. “The root of narcissism is massive insecurity… narcissists are always trying to create an image of themselves. [That’s why] he’s always denigrating other people and building up himself.”