A Laugh Cracks the Glass of Conformism – WHA ’26

On a tous besoin d’une caresse – illustration by Marilena Nardi

“Today it seems to me that critical responsibility is missing.
Goodism and political correctness strangle at the root any irreverent intent.
Satire, on the contrary, rests on its opposite:
the principle is to tear down the hypocrisies of common sense.”
Mario Monicelli

At last! I see nails scratching and teeth biting — not an irony of the absurd, tinged with futuristic and visionary pessimism, but one planted firmly on the ground, in the present, in the contradictions of the hinc et nunc, in the solipsism of consciences now silenced, ruminating over fragments of other people’s words and thoughts that find no echo and leave no trace. The cartoons of the World Humor Awards this time around have gained force; they have become aggressive and fierce, lacerating and sacrilegious, free of affectation and unnecessary second thoughts or omissions.

The result is a breath of fresh, light air — a laughter that spreads freely, without restraint, contagious, lightening the soul, becoming a grimace, an erasure of every caution and every hypocrisy. In previous years, the proposed theme pushed us to share fears and tremors that could not be resolved with a laugh, a jeer, an impertinence heir to the commedia dell’arte — so liberating because it strikes power, denounces social and civic absurdities, redeems the weak and the marginalised, and reveals the nakedness of the king. It does not wallow in brooding over the absurd aspects of life, but overturns the tables and upends their rules. The smile takes sides, while laughter, mockery, the stinging quip, breaks bridges — it places itself beyond the wink shared among allies of one faction against another, makes no pretence of building, but sets out to demonstrate the absurdity of certainties, of the banal, of the commonly held.

Fittingly, this small revolution — this return to fundamentals in a graphic humour award — was sparked by a theme apparently mild, faint, fragile and secondary: “kindness,” in a time of wars, fierce hatreds, and internal violence carried out with disruptive and unprecedented means, forcing us to fight with algorithms as well as with others, devious and deceitful. The cartoonists thus unleashed themselves against the hypocrisy of a bon ton that smells of stale talcum powder, of a languid and mannered imaginary, of an unctuous benevolence that is essentially disinterested and gratuitous — one that vanishes the moment it is dispensed like alms.

This is also a fine plunge into the real, into the vital relationship between what is essential and a virtual world that seems to coil around us like a serpent, rendering us dull and shapeless. A burst of laughter rings out like breaking glass. It shatters the display cases of the inertly sleeping, wresting us free from the rules imposed by an apparent commonality of feeling — from a project of social uniformity that would keep us silent yet sentient, unable to look upward, above, and discover who dominates us, uses us, and conditions our struggle to live. This long, resounding jeer makes the 2026 award catalogue richer, more beautiful, and more surprising still.

Parma, on the eve of the summer solstice
Marzio Dall’Acqua