Perhaps it made them feel even more revolutionary to laugh.

"'Mussolini,' Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen, told me, referring to 20th-century Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, 'had the same twisted sense of humor' as Trump. And stenograms of Communist Party and Politburo meetings in the era of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union show no shortage of notations of laughter — from jokes made at the expense of somebody about to be on the outs to a sort of forced or sycophantic fun. 'There’s a lot,' Maya Vinokour, a scholar of Stalinism, told me, 'and that even ends up being true as the purges start.'”

~ Michael Kruse

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/17/how-donald-trump-uses-humor-to-make-the-outrageous-sound-normal-00146119