The most effective way of attacking vice is to expose it to public ridicule. People can put up with rebukes, but they cannot bear being laughed at: they are prepared to be wicked but they dislike appearing ridiculous.

Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622–1673) built his career at the court of Louis XIV by writing comedies that anatomized social pretension, hypocrisy, and moral posturing. In seventeenth-century France, open moral denunciation could be politically and socially risky, but theatrical satire offered a sanctioned way to criticize behavior by making it laughable. The sentiment in this quotation aligns with Molière’s broader practice: characters such as Tartuffe (religious hypocrite) or Alceste’s targets in The Misanthrope are not merely condemned—they are exposed as absurd. The line is often cited in discussions of comedy’s social function: ridicule as a corrective more potent than sermonizing.

The remark crystallizes a core principle of Molière’s comic art: satire reforms less by moral lecturing than by making wrongdoing socially embarrassing. Rebuke can be met with defiance or rationalization, but laughter threatens reputation and self-image, turning vice into a kind of public failure. The line also implies a pragmatic, social view of ethics: many people will tolerate being “bad” in private so long as they can preserve dignity and status; ridicule punctures that protective mask. In this sense, comedy becomes a civic instrument—exposing hypocrisy, pretension, and corruption by rendering them absurd and therefore harder to defend.