The clip seemed harmless enough. A group of village children, asked what they wanted to be, answer that they want to become footballers. One of them names his hero — except it comes out as "Mausi" instead of "Messi." I laughed. I laughed hard enough that I sent it to a friend with a cheerful "you have to see this."

My friend happens to love football. He watched it. And then he said something that stopped my laughter mid-breath: "Going there and mocking their pronunciation, mocking their general knowledge — I don't find that funny."

The moment the joke stopped being funny

I sat with that. My first assumption had been wrong too — I'd imagined the boy was annoyed at being teased. That wasn't it at all. What I was actually laughing at was a child, in a setting far from English coaching and exposure, mispronouncing a name. He's a kid. He's playing. Whether he says "Mausi" or "Messi," "Roonaldo" or "Ronaldo" — what difference does it genuinely make to his life, or to mine?

My friend made the point sharper still. These children don't have the means — the access, the exposure — to learn "correct" pronunciation. So we take someone who never had the chance, and we make their lack of a chance into our entertainment.

What our laughter is doing

This is the uncomfortable bit. As a psychotherapist I see it constantly, and I'm honest enough to admit I do it too: very often when we mock someone, we are quietly pulling them down so we can stand a little taller. There's a small, ugly comfort in it. We feel a touch better about ourselves by laughing at someone who is below us — in language, in knowledge, in circumstance.

It isn't always conscious. That's what makes it worth noticing. The body and the social brain reach for the easy hit of superiority before the thinking mind catches up. So the work is simply to slow down and ask: what exactly am I laughing at? Am I laughing with someone, or laughing at something they had no power to choose?

A useful test

My friend offered one I keep returning to. If pronunciation is really the joke, take that same logic into a metropolitan city and stand in a room full of confident, well-spoken people — and ask them a few questions outside their world. Everyone has a gap. Everyone sounds clumsy somewhere. The only difference is that the village child's gap is filmed, captioned and shared, while ours stays comfortably private.

The line I now check

Humour is one of the warmest things humans do together. I'm not arguing against laughing. The distinction is whether the laughter needs a target who can't laugh back — a child, someone with less access, someone who isn't in the room to defend themselves. That's not comedy. That's a small act of contempt wearing comedy's face.

I include myself in this. I was one of the people laughing until a single honest sentence changed the picture. So before you share the next clip, or repeat the next imitation, pause for a second and locate the joke. If the only thing funny about it is that someone had less than you, it was never really funny — and it tells the room far more about you than about them.

What's your view on laughing this way? I'd genuinely like to hear it.