Testing a Theory of Laughter (original) (raw)

LAUGHTER AND LITERATURE: A PLAY THEORY OF HUMOR

Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 1–22, 2004

Humor seems uniquely human, but it has deep biological roots. Laughter, the best evidence suggests, derives from the ritualized breathing and open-mouth display common in animal play. Play evolved as training for the unexpected, as creatures put themselves at risk of losing balance or dominance so that they learn to recover. Humor in turn involves play with the expectations we share—whether innate or acquired—in order to catch one another off guard in ways that simulate risk and stimulate recovery. An evolutionary approach to three great literary humorists, Shakespeare, Nabokov and Beckett, shows that a species-wide explanation not only digs deeper but in no way diminishes individual difference.

The Prism of Laughter. Shakespeare's "very tragical mirth"

Monograph, published by VDM Verlag, Saarbrücken, 2009

The fusion of the comic and the tragic in the Shakespearean oeuvre seems a commonplace, however, in-depth studies devoted to this field have been quite rare. The present work chose laughter as an umbrella term and is mainly based on critical practice. The different manifestations of laughter and the (open or latent) comic on stage/page are examined in detail, with theoretical considerations. The introduction of the problems arising in laughter theories is followed by the investigation of the grotesque correlation of violence and laughter in Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors. The demonic side of laughter and Shakespeare s great villains are explored in the following, then different aspects of the carnival provide the groundwork for interpretation: of Falstaff s carnivalesque laughter, the ambiguity of (carnivalesque) masquerading (Edgar), and finally, the carnivalesque anti-carnival of King Lear is treated at great length. Informed but relatively free of technical jargon, the book should help not only the literary or Shakespeare scholar but might prove useful and enjoyable to anyone else interested in Shakespearean drama.

Narratives and emotions: revealing and concealing laughter

Folklore, 2008

My paper deals with laughter as an expression of emotions in stories.I study laughter both as a communicative factor in fieldwork and as a stylistic device in narratives. When is laughter used as an effect in storytelling and what does this laughter mean? Is laughter always an expression of humour and comics? What else can it be an expression of? The stories that I use for analysing laughter are personal experience stories of giving birth. In these stories women use laughter in many ways, both in contact with me as an interviewer, together with me, and as a way of marking the meaning of the story. The women often laugh when they talk about corporeality, pain and difficulties during labour, but also when they perform a self-presentation with elements that “almost” happened during birth. What do they reveal or conceal with laughter in narratives and what can the laughter reveal about the point of their narration?

The Bonds of Laughter: A Multidisciplinary Inquiry into the Information Processes of Human Laughter

2010

A new core hypothesis on laughter is presented. It has been built by putting together ideas from several disciplines: neurodynamics, evolutionary neurobiology, paleoanthropology, social networks, and communication studies. The hypothesis contributes to ascertain the evolutionary origins of human laughter in connection with its cognitive emotional signaling functions. The new behavioral and neurodynamic tenets introduced about this unusual sound feature of our species justify the ubiquitous presence it has in social interactions and along the life cycle of the individual. Laughter, far from being a curious evolutionary relic or a rather trivial innate behavior, should be considered as a highly efficient tool for inter-individual problem solving and for maintenance of social bonds.

Humour: some theoretical and clinical remarks

International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Education, 2012

The model used by Freud to explain the secret of laughter in response to wit is one of energy release. And yet, although his starting point was a reductionistic interpretation dominated by the concepts of censure and the bypassing of censure through unconscious desire and the need for release of accumulated tension in the organism, Freud was able to go beyond the limits imposed by his own definition in his analysis of his carefully collected Jewish jokes and so provide us with an analytical model valid for both literature and art. In the wake of Freud‟s writings and of research carried out by Kris and Gombrich, the author sets out to demonstrate how there is a third form of logic involved in wit and humour, in addition to the primary and secondary process, which relates them to literature and art.

Laughter and Collective Trauma in Aristophanic Comedy

Aristophanic Humor. Theory and Practice, 2020

Among the different yet often overlapping types of Aristophanic laughter (aggressive, subversive, bond-building, celebratory, to name a few), there is one category, not necessarily incompatible with those others, that seems to have gone largely unnoticed: the laughter of suffering. By this I do not mean the hostile mockery directed at a character who is suffering on-or offstage, like Lamachus in Acharnians or a host of other antagonists defeated by the Aristophanic hero. Nor do I point to the joyful reminiscence of past and overcome troubles, as will be later envisioned in Aeneas' famous 'forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit' (Aeneid 1.203). Rather, I refer to the laughter of the audience as it is prompted to recall the still painful memory of a collective trauma. To be fully understood and appreciated, this historically specific laughter which springs from simultaneous or very recent grief presupposes some knowledge of, or at least speculation about, the mental state of the original audience. It also shares certain affinities, to which I shall return, with Demeter's laughing response to Iambe's obscene antics in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (202f.) or with the therapeutic prescription of mirth and hilarity in the Hippocratic corpus, or even with the philosopher's laughter at our existential absurdity. 1 Yet its distinct character, ethnographically attested, may also be fruitfully approached from a psychological or neurological angle. One might correlate it, for instance, with the laughter arising, in Freud's famous account, from the discharge of the surplus psychical energy that would have been expended at the prospect of breaking a taboo, or the laughter that, in Ramachandran's theory, signals false alarm; both describe situations that create the anticipation of discomfort or danger, only to thwart the expectation. 2 For reasons that will emerge below, I prefer to invoke and draw on Helmuth Plessner's philosophical anthropology of laughing and crying and, especially, on the findings of neuroscience that social laughter has analgesic properties, as it elevates the threshold of even physical pain, but also that laughing and crying are subject to analogous neurological pathologies. 3 Frogs and Arginusae Frogs provides a prototype for this kind of laughter by boldly thematizing the link between jokes and suffering in the very opening of the play, a scene that has been analysed frequently and perceptively. 4 It shows us a character, Dionysus' slave Xanthias, repeatedly frustrated in his urge to tell jokes that connect the pressure of bowel