No one is especially shy about the anger they feel about the partygate shambles in Downing Street, nor should they be. We are all a bit more discreet, though, about how enjoyable it is to watch the prime minister’s downfall. It hits every base of funny, from the slapstick to the surreal; a comedy home run. But there is something delicious here that is richer than humour. To see a chancer unmasked is a very particular pleasure.
Likewise, I would happily give you my thoughts on the international tennis elite and their stance on vaccination. But why it was so droll to see Novak Djokovic detained in and then deported from Australia I would struggle to say; I never had anything against the man.
Such is schadenfreude, the piquant German compound at once so broad and so precise. It is usually defined as the taking of pleasure in another’s misfortune. You don’t have to know them personally; indeed, sometimes it is better not to. The unfortunate object doesn’t have to deserve their lot, although it is so much more enjoyable when they do that we will often reverse-engineer our perceptions to make them deserve it. The most similar words in English are probably “gloating” and “crowing”, but those convey a vocalised delight. Schadenfreude is more of a private pleasure, which we would prefer not to admit.
Presently, of course, we don’t have to say it out loud, since we are all feeling the same thing at the same time. Welcome to the age of collective schadenfreude – the global in-joke.
On the one hand, this is a wonderful thing, the first green shoots of social harmony. On the other, “it is a kind of sadistic joy”, says Dr Aaron Balick, a psychoanalyst and the author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking. “If you allow yourself enough empathy and compassion, you’re not going to be able to enjoy it.” So, can anything positive come out of our basest instincts?
The most recent thinking about schadenfreude is distilled in a 2019 paper by the academic psychologists Shensheng Wang, Scott Lilienfeld and Philippe Rochat. They argue that there is not one force at play here, but three.
The first element is social comparison, rooted in what Balick describes as “the way people manage their own egos, how they wish to perceive themselves as good enough or sometimes better than others … it is a reward experience, that feeling of superiority when someone else fails”. This is the schadenfreude that is rooted in envy or resentment, the kind you would be likely to feel towards a friend who was also a rival. It is more intense than the kind you might feel towards someone you don’t know.
Using Boris Johnson as an example, his tribulations excite no satisfaction of envy in me, since I don’t use him as a benchmark, either morally or in terms of achievement. This pleasure is an individual one – it would be hard to build any collectivity around resentment, driven as it is by ego. Plus, we wouldn’t readily admit it – even to ourselves.
Second, schadenfreude is motivated by the establishment of intergroup dynamics. This is broadly characterised as aggression – enjoying someone’s failure as a way of placing them outside your group, thereby strengthening the bonds within your group.
Again, this sounds like one of the uglier faces of human nature, but it depends on what values you are clustering around. If you are uniting on the side of integrity and humanity, then there is a lot of galvanising joy to be had from collectively identifying people who are dishonest and inhumane and placing them outside your group.
Alex Andreou, the co-host of the podcast Oh God, What Now? (formerly Remainiacs), draws a lot of optimism from this moment. “Just as Brexit went beyond traditional tribes, I think partygate is doing the same thing: it redefines the alignment. My only concern is that I don’t know that Labour is responding in a way that meets the mood and captures the feeling.”
If that is true, it may be because you need a heightened sense of the absurd, and of self-parody, to fully enjoy the aggressive element of schadenfreude. Basically, you need to be able to say: “I, too, am a bit of an arsehole, but, come on, isn’t this intoxicating?” That kind of bubble-bursting self-criticism isn’t the Labour leader’s forte, but few politicians can claim that it is theirs, either. You have to go deep into Ken Clarke or Jess Phillips territory.
It is also volatile, since the pleasure is extinguished immediately if there is a trace of compassion for the person at the centre. Take Allegra Stratton’s tearful resignation over the video in which she joked about a Downing Street party. “That didn’t make me happy in any way,” says Andreou. “I thought she was genuinely distressed. I can’t bring myself to celebrate that.”
If you want to enjoy seeing someone in pain, they must come to represent something larger than themself. Stratton, having been the prime minister’s spokesperson (although not at the time of her resignation), worked as a symbol of the whole, but you had to determinedly avert your eyes from the fact that she was also a breathing, feeling human.
Similarly, when news of the nth Downing Street party broke – the prime minister’s birthdaygate, when he was “ambushed” by cake – I experienced the totally unwanted emotion of sympathy. Not for him, obviously, but for Lulu Lytle, who has been immortalised as the purveyor of the most vulgar, post-imperialist fantasia, whose wallpaper will never again be considered except as a joke, who now has cake attached for the full Marie Antoinette (even though she had nothing to do with the baked goods). The scale of her public disaster is out of whack with her “crime”, which was merely to bod about being posh, meeting the strange demands of other posh people.
This brings us to the third element of schadenfreude, the delicious twist that makes it disclosable to others, so that we can cluster around it like a log fire: cosmic justice. “When you get a homophobic preacher found in bed with a rent boy, or a religious moralist caught having an affair, it becomes: ‘See, everyone? We were right about those people,’” says Balick. “And then it elevates the in-group into something more righteous, more justice-oriented.”
The external politics provide the requisite symmetry: if you want to believe the universe is steadily, invisibly working towards righting wrongs, then it has to look neat. The Johnsonian context was, as Andreou describes, “this strong feeling that the referendum was won with lies, and so we instinctively rejoice at lies becoming the instrument of his destruction. Exactly the same nexus of behaviour that was rewarded in 2016, and then rewarded again in 2019, has brought him down.”
It is irrational in the sense that the universe doesn’t really do justice; there is no such thing as karma. Yet it is rational on a more basic level, what Andreou calls “legitimate gratification at the bad guy not winning all the time”.
The punishment has to fit the crime not just in scale, but also thematically. There was no great buzz when Matt Hancock was busted for having an affair with an adviser; infinitely preferable would have been an affair with one of the PPE providers he had fast-tracked into multimillion-pound government contracts. We were cheated of our dramatic arc.
The thirst for justice or fairness is a human trait, visible in babies of six months old. So, it is unsurprising to be satisfied by it, but what makes it so funny? The standup comedian Kate Smurthwaite explains: “Comedy, generally, is when something happens that we didn’t expect, but which does make sense. The great joy of schadenfreude is that we didn’t expect it, but it makes sense because they deserved it. It’s almost like a moment when we wonder if we actually can control things with our mind.”
So, there is an element of self-mockery buried within – we are enjoying a sense of power that we know we don’t have in a well-ordered universe that we know doesn’t exist. But comedy can tip easily into cruelty – and the line between them can be blurred by your mood. “As a general rule, we can laugh if someone’s pride or ego is hurt,” says Smurthwaite. “If it’s their head, then either don’t laugh or wait till the ambulance has left.”
It is a burning necessity, for the full schadenfreude experience, that the person starts out with very high status. There is no joy in watching the punctured pride of a no-mark. They need to be punished for something about which you are passionate, too, or at least something you can claim to believe in. “You get all your elements in one with Djokovic,” Balick says. “The collective witnessing of a person who is high status, getting their just deserts in the service of the vaccination argument that you care about.”
But how productive is it, politically speaking? The political sociologist Paula Surridge counsels that we shouldn’t get too excited. “There is a body of literature, especially in the US, about ‘negative partisanship’. Voters aren’t motivated so much by love of their own side as dislike of the other. However, in our voting system, that doesn’t lead to a positive expression for another party. A strong anti-Conservative feeling will quite often lead that vote to segment.”
Surridge argues that we are not all enjoying this moment for the same reasons – and many aren’t enjoying it at all. “People who voted Conservative in 2019 did so because they thought their areas were going to get better. I imagine some of them feel like they’ve been taken for fools and they won’t be delighting in the present moment. I don’t think it’s a good place for democracy, for them to feel like that.”
For this moment to exist, we needed social media. In the first instance, to evidence our case. Then, Balick says, “there’s this added element of creativity – you can always find the perfect quote, or an old picture that’s directly related to the downfall. Once you have your meme behind you, you can really nail it.”
There is much focus on the negative aspects of Twitter or Facebook, their echo chambers and rabbit holes, the brittle, raging impulses they seem to unleash in previously civilised people. While that is true, our (mistaken) sense that these communications are ephemeral unleashes a playful self‑disclosure, a readiness to admit ignoble feelings. That combination of openness, humour and self-deprecation on one side, and a shared quest for justice and fairness on the other, creates a sense of unity that is almost explosive. The only risk is that we enjoy it so much, and it is so ludic, that it goes the way of satire: the negative consequences we were enjoying so much evaporate as we sink, giggling, into the sea.
