One of Banksy’s most recognisable images, Laugh Now depicts a chimpanzee with slumped shoulders and a lowered head, wearing a sandwich board that reads: “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge.” Its apparently submissive posture contrasts with the defiant message, turning an image of humiliation into a warning that power may not remain in the same hands forever.

In 2002, Banksy created a version of Laugh Now for the Ocean Rooms nightclub in Brighton, UK. Stretching approximately six metres, the work repeated the chimpanzee figure across a long panel behind the bar. The repetition gives the message a collective force: those dismissed or ridiculed today may become the ones who shape tomorrow.

The chimpanzee can be read both as an exploited animal and as a symbol of people pushed to the margins of society. From this perspective, the work questions human claims to superiority while challenging the hierarchies through which some lives are valued above others. Its imagined reversal of authority may also evoke Planet of the Apes, although this remains an interpretation rather than a confirmed reference.

Combining dark humour with a quietly threatening prediction, Laugh Now asks viewers to reconsider who holds power—and how secure that position really is. The image was also issued as a screenprint in 2003, in editions of 150 signed and 600 unsigned impressions.