LAUGH NOW

Description

A solitary chimpanzee stands against a concrete wall, its long arms hanging heavily beside a sandwich-board placard declaring: “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge.” The figure appears almost resigned—shoulders lowered, expression impassive—yet the message it carries predicts a complete reversal of power.

The contrast is central to the image. Banksy gives the apparently powerless creature the confidence to imagine a future in which existing hierarchies have been overturned. The placard itself evokes both protest and the advertising boards traditionally carried by anonymous street workers, reinforcing the tension between submission and defiance.

Ladbroke Grove: The Birth of Laugh Now

An early version of Laugh Now was painted near The Elgin on Ladbroke Grove in West London around 2000. Its chronology can be established independently through the video for Gorillaz's Tomorrow Comes Today, which includes an early Banksy Laugh Now monkey and was released with the band's EP on 27 November 2000. The motif was therefore already present on London's streets by late 2000.

This is significant because Laugh Now has often been associated with Banksy's celebrated Ocean Rooms commission in Brighton in 2002. The Ladbroke Grove work demonstrates that the image originated earlier on the street. At the Ocean Rooms, Banksy transformed the solitary monkey into a long procession of repeated figures carrying placards: one apparently powerless outsider had become an army.

From Street Stencil to Banksy Icon

Banksy subsequently developed Laugh Now across canvases, boards and the celebrated 2003 screenprint edition, establishing the monkey as one of his defining early motifs. Monkeys would continue to appear throughout his work as instruments for questioning supposedly natural hierarchies between the powerful and powerless, civilized and primitive, ruler and ruled.

The idea reaches an extraordinary later conclusion in Devolved Parliament, where chimpanzees occupy the benches of the House of Commons. What the isolated Ladbroke Grove monkey had predicted around 2000 appears, within Banksy's visual universe, finally to have happened.

The importance of the original mural lies precisely in its modest beginnings. Before Laugh Now became an edition, a collectible image or an icon of Banksy's career, a solitary monkey stood on a graffiti-covered London wall announcing that one day the hierarchy would change.

At the time, almost nobody knew who Banksy was.