Noël Godin, the Belgian artist who spent half a century turning whipped cream into a form of democratic protest, died at 80. Working from the conviction that absurdity could reach where argument could not, he targeted billionaires, filmmakers, and philosophers alike — not with anger, but with the quiet radicalism of refusing to treat power as sacred. His passing invites us to sit with an old and unresolved question: whether laughter and humiliation, aimed precisely enough, can loosen the grip of authority in ways that earnest resistance never quite manages.