Early in Shakespeare’s Othello, the title character says, “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.” It’s Othello’s response to men who have come to arrest him for marrying Desdemona. Although not a laugh line, it tells everyone present that Othello is amused and in control.

Laughter, the most obvious signal of amusement, can be complicated, even mysterious. If you spot someone sitting alone in a restaurant quietly weeping, you might want to comfort her, but if she’s laughing and there’s no sign of a book nearby or, say, ear buds, you might wonder if she’s out of control.

Laughter is so profoundly social I enjoy comedy most as part of a laughing audience. Caught laughing alone, I’m inclined to explain my behavior.

Laughter can be therapeutic. When a college president I knew learned he had terminal brain cancer, he decided against surgery that would risk his loss of language, but he accepted advice from those who told him to watch films that made him laugh.

Well before Donald Trump’s election, televised satire with chortling audiences had become an important part of our country’s political conversation.

People my age are likely to remember fondly the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. And much contemporary political satire has been shaped by the likes of Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Conan O’Brien, Seth Myers and Jimmy Kimmel. Since Trump’s election, satire has burgeoned. Saturday Night Live has become livelier. Even for an early-to-bed like me, these late-night comedians are influential.

When people laugh together, they acknowledge fellowship, often an agreement on values. That’s one reason speakers on serious subjects sometimes tell jokes, and it’s why stand-up comedians say they feel lonely when their jokes don’t work onstage. Last September I was invited to talk with the students and faculty of Kimball Union Academy about our approaching presidential election. “I can’t think of a good bipartisan joke,” I admitted, “but I can recommend the writing of Andy Borowitz.” I also plugged Garrison Keillor’s political satire and the work of several political cartoonists.

Lately I’ve been wondering what exactly I thought we could discover in laughing about our political predicament, which was already looking pretty grim in September. Back in May, Caitlin Flanagan published an essay in Atlantic, How Late-Night Comedy Fueled the Rise of Trump. She blamed some of the comedians I named above, especially Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah, for alienating conservatives and making liberals appear smug.

Anyone who has told a joke to strangers will probably understand how risky humor can be. Misread your audience and you’re in trouble. Sometimes the problem can be just one member of your audience. When President Obama skillfully satirized Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 2011, Trump seemed to take deep offense.

Trying to update my take on laughter, I recently bought Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Here’s how it begins: “The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart hate is what it was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all.” Sound familiar?

Noah’s tales from his childhood and youth are a reminder that people who devote their lives to making others laugh are often finding their way through their own pain and sadness.

Then I read Dartmouth grad Louise Erdrich’s comments on Sen. Al Franken’s new memoir, Al Franken: Giant of the Senate. Erdrich claims to have skipped meals to read Al Franken because it was so funny. Although Noah’s Born a Crime is not very funny at all, it reveals the source of his satirical power.

In Franken’s very funny book, he explains why he had to be careful about being funny once he decided to run for the U.S. Senate. Now that he’s been elected, his staff works hard to keep him from making jokes that alienate conservatives or make liberals appear smug.

We probably can’t laugh our way out of our political predicament, but Franken makes a case for using humor to bring people together. Closing a chapter, “I Screw Up,” about his efforts to overcome a mistake he made in his difficult relationship with Sen. Mitch McConnell, he says, “sometimes we go to dinner and Mitch will laugh so hard that milk shoots out of his nose.” Franken could be making that last part up, but it’s a noble aspiration that might have appealed to Shakespeare.

Bill Nichols, who retired from the faculty at Denison University in 1998, lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.