Every Time You Dunk on an Expert, You’re Being an Even Bigger Snob

You know that feeling when some self-important blowhard gets publicly humiliated, and you can’t help but laugh? That schadenfreude hit — the gleeful catharsis of watching an arrogant ‘expert’ get taken down a peg? Renaissance theater audiences felt it too. They felt it so hard they built an entire genre around it.

On the stages of 16th-century Europe, pedants were the punchline. Stock characters with donkey heads and worthless idiot labels paraded across the stage, lampooning scholars who couldn’t shut up about their Latin conjugations. Audiences roared. It felt like liberation — the common people sticking it to the ivory tower.

Except the joke was never on the pedant. The joke was on everyone who didn’t get it.

Here’s the paradox nobody talks about: to fully appreciate a parody of pedantry, you had to be educated enough to recognize what was being parodied. You needed to know the Latin being mangled. You needed to catch the scholarly references being butchered. You needed to be, well… a pedant yourself — or at least adjacent enough to one to understand the damage.

The Renaissance stage didn’t democratize knowledge. It created a velvet rope. When a playwright mocked a grammarian’s obsessive declensions, the illiterate majority in the pit laughed at the slapstick. But the literate minority? They laughed harder, and differently, because they got the real joke. Two audiences, same theater, completely different experiences — and only one of them was in on it.

Mockery doesn’t dismantle hierarchies. It just builds new ones with better camouflage.

Think about how this plays out now. Academic Twitter dunking on bad methodology. Reddit threads dissecting someone’s logical fallacies by name. The satisfying ritual of posting a screenshot of a terrible take with a single-word caption: ‘Remarkable.’ Every one of these acts pretends to be anti-elitist — taking down the pretentious, exposing the fraud. But to participate, you need the vocabulary. You need to know what ‘strawman’ means, what ‘peer review’ requires, what ‘citation needed’ implies about epistemic standards.

The dunk is the new donkey head. Same ritual, different century.

Renaissance playwrights understood something we’ve forgotten: satire is the most exclusive club in any culture. It presents itself as the people’s weapon, but it functions as the elite’s password. The pedant parodies of the 1500s weren’t rebellion — they were initiation ceremonies. You laughed at the right moments, you belonged. You laughed at the wrong ones, you were the donkey.

Every circle has its circle-jerk, and the first rule of the circle-jerk is pretending you’re not in one.

This is why the ‘anti-intellectual’ label gets thrown around so carelessly today. When someone doesn’t laugh at an erudite takedown, we don’t ask whether they understood the reference. We assume they’re hostile to knowledge itself. But maybe they just weren’t handed the program. Maybe the Renaissance peasant in the pit who laughed at the donkey head wasn’t anti-intellectual either — maybe he was just watching a different show than the one the playwright actually wrote.

The uncomfortable truth is that intellectual hierarchies don’t need defenders. They need mockers. Mockery is how insiders identify each other without saying so explicitly. It’s a shibboleth dressed as rebellion. The Renaissance pedant parody said: ‘Look at this ridiculous scholar’ — but the subtext was: ‘Look at me, I know enough to find this ridiculous.’ The performance of contempt is the credential.

You don’t mock what you’re outside of. You mock what you’ve graduated from.

So the next time you share a devastating takedown of some public intellectual’s bad take, ask yourself: am I dismantling expertise, or am I flashing my badge? The Renaissance stage had an answer. It just took five hundred years for anyone to hear it over the laughter.