Toohey has a very conscious purpose: he “kills by laughter.” This is malicious laughter—the laughter of modernism. As Louis Sass puts it in Madness and Modernism, “it is only in the modernist era that we find artworks whose most central attitude is not to communicate or to celebrate, but to pour scornful laughter on the whole of existence.”

- Robert Mayhew. Humor in The Fountainhead.