Rendered in Banksy’s signature monochrome stencilled style, Laugh Now features a slump-shouldered, forlorn-looking monkey wearing a sandwich board bearing the foreboding pledge ‘Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge’. Though a seemingly comic image at first glance, the social critique behind this image quickly becomes apparent. The chimpanzee is one of Banksy’s most frequently used motifs, alongside the rat, often paired with signage imparting pithy remarks that provide pejorative commentaries on a range of socio-political aspects of contemporary life. These animals often serve a didactic role in Banksy’s works, and the monkey in Laugh Now is no exception.

The chimpanzee first appeared in Banksy’s oeuvre in 2002 when the artist was commissioned by a nightclub in Brighton to create a six-metre long spray-painted mural of the figure repeated ten times, making it unusual for the artist whose works are usually created foremost for public spaces. It was from this work that subsequent versions of Laugh Now were created. Versions of this work have been exhibited widely; indeed, the current work was included in an exhibition titled War, Capitalism, and Liberty hosted by the Palazzo Cipolla in Rome in 2016. Consequently, it has become one of Banksy’s most iconic and widely disseminated images, making headlines in 2008 when the original artwork successfully sold at auction, breaking the record for the artist at the time.

In the present work, the monkey illustrates the arrogance of mankind. Since Charles Darwin’s development of his theory of evolution in the mid-nineteenth century, which asserted that humans evolved from apes, humans have set out to distance themselves from their primate ancestors by dismissing them as stupid, aggressive, or deviously clever. Similarly, graffiti art has been ridiculed as naïve and uneducated, but Banksy upholds that it is the most powerful and efficient means of artistic expression today and has been quoted saying

In this light, Laugh Now can be understood as a representation of the working class, exploited and enslaved by capitalism, who take to the streets to spread their message. Banksy has revisited this theme regularly through in well-known works like Christ with Shopping Bags and Gangsta Rat. Afterall, that is what Banksy aims to achieve himself, creating thought-provoking social critiques through a range of urban interventions under the cover of darkness – and an assumed moniker.

Seeking to interfere and disrupt the status-quo through his defiant and anti-establishmentarian practice, Banksy has encapsulated his own mission with the maxim: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” – a contemporary take on the turn-of-the-century American satirist Finley Peter Dunne’s declaration that the duty of a newspaper is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” (Finley Peter Dunne cited in: Dean P. Turnbloom, Ed., Prizewinning Political Cartoons: 2010 Edition, Gretna 2010, p. 146). Much of Banksy’s success, which has reached legendary status oscillating between acclaim and notoriety, is due to his distinctive style of satirical street art and graffiti that translates complex messages into highly legible images presented for the public, in public. “Typically crafting his images with spray paint and cardboard stencils, Banksy is able to achieve a meticulous level of detail. His aesthetic is clean and instantly readable-broad social cartooning rendered with the graphic bang of an indie concert poster" (Lauren Collins, ‘Banksy Was Here’, The New Yorker, 14 May 2007, online).

As tremendously deployed in Laugh Now, Banksy is a master of surprising juxtapositions; using humour and biting satire, his work undercuts the elite to elevate the proletarian and shed light on the great issues of our time.