AFTERWORD When Is a Joke Not a Joke? The Paradox of Egalitarianism k Bruce Kapferer The Charlie Hebdo event is defined by acts whose very dynamic form—humor and violence—is that of excess where human existential realities are brought to the point of their collapse and perhaps to their point of renewal. Humor and violence are about human existence at its lim- its; in many ways they share an identity, or reveal an iden- tity, in the process. In Charlie Hebdo they achieved force in the context of global realities that increasingly are per- ceived to be without limitation and in the coils of their own excesses: where capital is without constraint, where value has no value, where corruption is rife, where rival funda- mentalisms hold sway, where all has become one state of exception in which war and misery reign. The event of Charlie Hebdo refracts a world in virtual apocalyptic crisis. The spectacle of the Charlie Hebdo event, the event as spectacle in this society of the spectacle, had every ingre- dient of the theater of the absurd, its marriage of comedy and tragedy ending in an explosion of violent bloody death. But here, in Charlie Hebdo, art certainly became life, Artaud and Debord rolled into one. The ‘deep play’ of its theater whereby the public became absorbed and a participant in its process was because everything seemed