laughing stock
idiom

- if you say that a person or an organisation has become a laughing stock, you mean that they are supposed to be important or serious but have been made to seem ridiculous.

- someone or something that seems stupid or silly, especially by trying to be serious or important and failing.

- an object of ridicule; one who is made the subject of laughter or derision.

Collins English Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary, Merriam-Webster

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WORD ORIGIN

The word stock entered English in around 862, borrowed from the Germanic, originally meaning a tree trunk. Over the following centuries it broadened to describe any fixed object used as the target of some repeated action. By the early 16th century, English had a small family of compound words built on this model: a whipping-stock was a post to which someone was tied for flogging; a jesting-stock was a person made the butt of jokes; a gaping-stock was someone stared at in wonder or contempt.

Laughing stock appears in the written record around 1518 and Shakespeare sealed its place in the language around 1597 in The Merry Wives of Windsor: "Pray you let us not be laughing-stocks to other men's humours."

The phrase is sometimes wrongly linked to the medieval punishment device — the stocks — in which offenders had their ankles locked in wood while passersby jeered at them. The connection feels intuitive but is not the direct source. The stock in laughing stock refers to the older Germanic sense of a fixed, passive object — something that simply stands there and receives what is thrown at it.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

A LAUGHING STOCK, a national / public /standing / walking joke, be held up to ridicule, be lampooned (made a fool of, pilloried, publicly roasted, ridiculed, sent up), become a byword for failure, become the talk of the town (for all the wrong reasons), bring shame on oneself, buffoon, butt of jokes, clown, come a cropper in public, come off badly, comic figure, cut a ridiculous figure, dupe, eat humble pie publicly, expose oneself to ridicule, fall flat on one's face, fall guy, figure of fun, fool, foolish spectacle, get egg on one's face, held in contempt, invite mockery, joke of the town, lay oneself open to ridicule, look like a fool, lose face, make a spectacle of oneself (an exhibition of oneself), not taken seriously, object of derision (of mockery, of ridicule, of scorn), open to ridicule, own goal, patsy, public embarrassment, put to shame, scapegoat, scorned figure, set up as an example of failure, source of amusement, standing joke, target of laughter (of ridicule), the joke of the town, whipping boy, widely derided (mocked)

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LAUGHING PHRASES

-  A barrel of laughs = a person or source of a lot of fun or amusement

-  A horse laugh = sarcastic laugh

- A belly laugh = deep, uncontrolled, hearty laugh

- Who laughs last, laughs longest = when someone does something not nice to you, they may laugh, but you will feel better by winning in the end

- Man plans and God laughs = the plans of imperfect humans are never guaranteed to work out

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“Falling asleep during virtual meetings is a good way to become a LAUGHING STOCK.”

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