A few days back, a short video clip from Lucknow travelled across the country. It showed Congress workers gathered on a road trying to burn an effigy of Kangana Ranaut because of her recent comments on Gen Z. The police were desperately trying to stop them. As soon as the effigy caught fire, a policeman rushed forward, snatched the effigy and ran full tilt up the road – the effigy still blazing in his grasp and panting protesters chasing him. He may have thought was just doing his job and doing it diligently. But within a few hours, some enterprising Gen Z with a camera had edited the incident into a reel. And before he even knew it, the running policeman was a viral meme. The video that bounced around the country didn’t show the authorities in control, it showed them looking really silly.Watching the meme, I was reminded of the Otpor! movement in Serbia in the late 1990s – a rag-tag movement started by a few disgruntled young Serbians which snowballed into a mass resistance movement that brought down dictator Slobodan Milosevic’s decade-long iron-fisted regime. Right from the outset Otpor!’s young founders instinctively knew that the only way they could counter the dictator’s stranglehold was through humour. So, they placed a barrel in a town square with a large picture of Milosevic’s face stuck on it. They also placed a wooden bat next to the barrel. The sign stuck on the top read: drop a coin in for the dictator’s retirement fund. If you don’t have a coin (most people had none, thanks to the economic crisis brought about by Milosovic), pick up the bat and take a swing at his face.Passersby hesitated wondering if it was some sort of trick by the regime. But, soon a queue formed. Men and women who had nothing left to lose began taking hefty swings at the barrel. Hearing about the commotion, the police arrived. By then, the line of bat-swingers stretched long. The police had two options: they could arrest ordinary citizens for hitting a barrel or arrest (take away) the barrel. They arrested the barrel. Although this was a time before the phone-camera and instant internet access, Otpor! activists surreptitiously photographed all the action and handed the pictures to opposition press. The Serbian nation awoke the next day to newspaper pictures of Milosovic’s feared police force looking extremely foolish while taking a barrel into custody. This one incident broke the vice-like psychological grip that Milosovic had over the people of his country.The leader of Otpor!, Srdja Popovic, calls these kinds of actions ‘dilemma actions.’ In his book, Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators or Simply Change the World, he explains that when put in similar situations, no matter what the opposing side does, it loses. Popovic argues that the use of humour against an oppressor, does three things that other kinds of protest cannot. First, laughing at the oppressor breaks the fear they hold over you, making a larger cause look attractive and helping it grow exponentially as funny people generally amass a large following. Second, it unsettles the oppressor because powerful people take themselves very seriously. Third, and most importantly, mockery makes oppressors lash out in foolish ways, perpetuating the laughter even further, which was the point all along. This is also called ‘laughtivism.’ And this is exactly what the Gen Z pulled off in India last month.The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), born out of an insult, just this year in the month of May, ran the Popovic playbook perhaps even without having heard of Otpor! or having read Popovic’s book. Gen Z’s phone-camera warriors filmed fit-checks outside metro stations on the way to Jantar Mantar. They made reels of themselves running from security personnel with Subway Surfers music playing in the background. Their follower counts soared overnight. When the lathis came out on July 20, they ran, but soon came back singing the national anthem. The police downed the lathis. The protesters proceeded to poke fun at the police and drove the fear of authority out of other young minds. They made ‘Get-Ready-With-Me’ (GRWM) videos for “getting beaten by the police.” The protest became ‘cool’ and soon attracted not just other Gen Z, but Millenials, Gen X and Boomers too. And by July 25, Gen Z’s laughtivism struck its first blow. The Union education minister resigned. So why should the practice of laughtivism matter to someone who has never even thought of formally protesting a cause in their life? Two reasons. One, laughtivism is the easiest way to protest those in power. Marching on the streets can take a measure of courage and organisation most of us cannot summon. However, telling a joke takes no huge effort except using brain-power in a creative way. A humorous Instagram reel poking fun at a societal wrong can easily reach across socio-economic barriers, from your building’s watchman to your mother’s kitty-party WhatsApp group.Two, laughtivism trains the eye for all-around irony. If you spot it once, you can spot it everywhere – in the political party you oppose as well as the one you vote for. And this skill carries no political focus. You can even spot it in the people and processes that claim to serve you while simultaneously undercutting you. For example, in your society’s draconian rules and regulations, in your corporate boss’s slickly-delivered but self-serving town hall; the list is endless.Nevertheless, laughtivism comes with some riders. Popovic is honest about these risks and so should we. Laughtivism divides. Mockery flusters the opposition and can draw a harsher response than a placard would. Sometimes humiliated people hit back harder. And it is not spontaneous; we have to keep inventing new ways to tell the tales.Hans Christian Andersen wrote the first draft of a classic tale of laughtivism in 1837: a vain emperor who is conned into wearing an invisible suit. No one dares to tell him that he actually has nothing on until a child says out loud that the emperor is naked. After the crowd erupts into laughter, the emperor is humiliated and sees the truth. Indeed a pleasing tale of righting wrongs.But on the flip side is the sequel to Anderson’s tale written by Ye Shengtao and published in 1930.In Shengtao’s version, the emperor feels humiliated but does not accept the truth. He summons his soldiers. Citizens are chased down and rounded up. Laughter is banned, then whispering, then criticism, with all to be punished by death. And then, the open-faced lie is written into law. The emperor spends the rest of his life naked, patting his bare skin to smooth wrinkles out of nothing.Shengtao’s version is a cautionary tale for those who use laughtivism to use it judiciously. Yet it is more so for those who are the targets of laughtivism, facing the brunt of the joke. Outlawing the joke does not kill it. It only guarantees that you will be the joke forever.Piyush Jha is a filmmaker, author and cultural commentator.