Laughter

Warren Zhu, Year 13, Churchill House

We have the beautiful, ringing laughter of a kid that signifies life, joy, enthusiasm and purity. And we have the laugh of the Joker (and Norman Bates from Psycho), uncanny and terrifying, a symptom of radical evil, a person filled with resentment, bent on destruction. Laughter is, like almost everything else, full of contradictions. This makes, though, the question, “ what is laughter?” , all the more interesting.

I Here are three famous theories of laughter:

1.

2. Superiority Theory—laughter is an expression of my feeling of superiority at the thing laughed at.

Relief/Cathartic Theory—laughter releases the tension accrued in the psyche through various means. 3. Incongruity Theory—laughter is when two incongruous things are paired together.

They are all, in some respects, correct. We sometimes laugh at things or people because we feel superior to them, as when, for example, we laugh at Donald Trump. We sometimes laugh to relieve tension within us, as when many nervous A-level Politics students awkwardly laughed at each other when it seemed as though Trump was going to win the election. We sometimes laugh because what is presented in front of us is incongruous, as when we see Trump in the Whitehouse. Indeed, sometimes we laugh out of relief, superiority, and incongruity—just think about Trump again!

However, none of these three theories are satisfactory, because all of them are correct. All point to some ontic manifestations of laughter, but for this reason, does not probe its ontological significance.

II Laughter≠Happiness

Babies laugh and cry excessively. For them, the two are inseparable. Both are responses to novelty, only that laughter is more an embracing of novelty (almost like Kant’ s discussion of the sublime as majestic and fearful without actual threat), and cry, fear of it. The first step towards understanding laughter, then, is to explore this chaotic novelty that lies within what we ordinarily take as an expression of happiness.

In Chinese, there is the expression of KuXiao—literally, a “bitter laugh” : a grievous, weak, helpless response to a situation that is simultaneously frustrating, angst-provoking, infuriating, absurd, surreal, and idiotic. Thus, our natural response to Stalin ' s comment apropos the Ukraine famines — “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’ s only statistics ” —is a chuckle of discomfort and terror. This, perhaps, is also why Kafka laughed so hard at his own stories (in its characteristic grimness of the kind “there is hope, but not for us ”), to the point of waking up his neighbors. And why, maybe, the best movies about the Holocaust from Life is Beautiful to The Great Dictator, are comedies. The tragic hero still has a certain dignity in the face of fate, emanating a certain pathos in his revolt against it, whereas the comic clown is completely resigned, with his gestures of rebellion resolved into meaningless, bitter, laughter.

III Laughter=(≠?)Risky

Laughter, as a self-sustaining spontaneous eruption, implies a bit of idiocy (as when one person ’ s laugh invokes another to laugh, which simultaneously prolongs the original laugh, when, in fact, the original affair is not worth laughing about, and one begins to laugh at one ’ s own laughter), which is why, perhaps, Kant said that laughter is a play of thought. But for laughter to be this incessant repetition without “ use ” , in the ordinary sense of the term, does not mean that it is useless. The use of laughter consists not in its concrete effects, but of the intangible symbolic connections it forges.

Laughter has this effect mainly because it takes a certain risk, both when we laugh at others, and when we laugh at ourselves. The exchange of insults (banter) between two friends, for example, tests and solidifies a friendship. It—akin to the exchange of gifts, which, seemingly insignificant and useless and wasteful, forges social connection—requires both an understanding of their friend and how much they can take in (lest the banter becomes an insult), but also their trust in their friend’ s commitment to the friendship. This element within laughter is seen most clearly when either we make a selfdeprecating joke, or when we laugh with others at a joke directed towards ourselves; there, we are taking a certain risk (of being ridiculed), whilst simultaneously implying: “Yes, I am a deeply flawed human being. But I am at home with my faults. I can even recognize and thus improve upon them. ”

This risk that laughter takes can be seen in more concrete forms. Of comedians and civilians who are pillared and prosecuted for joking and laughing about strange, unjust things in dictatorial (and, sometimes, democratic) regimes. This prosecution is also a testament to laughter ’ s great power to stir and unnerve, to expose the corruption, the contradictions within the status quo (c.f. the incongruity

Rachel Li, Year 13, Wu House

theory), and to undermine authority.

But laughter, as noted above, is contradictory. And just as it takes risks and challenges the status quo, laughter can also pacify and make one complacent. In situations of discomfort, when something embarrassing happens—an awkward silence, a misunderstanding, a stupid calculation done in a Maths problem. In communist Yugoslavia, in fact, a popular joke goes about how the government must be producing jokes about itself and disseminating them to the public to help people cope with its terrible mismanagement of the country. This, exactly, is the role of canned laughter. It does not merely signal to us when we should laugh— because we don ’t normally laugh with ‘ canned’ laughter—but it laughs for us so that we can happily enjoy a TV show without the effort of producing laughter after a long day ’ s work. And is not this the role of so much of what we call “ entertainment” today? Producing amusement, laughter, that is ontologically static, that wastes our lives away, rather than laughter that unnerves ourselves about our present condition, and stirs us into action to improve our lives?

IV Laughter=Fundamental Attunement

In one of the most memorable passages of On the Road, Kerouac goes:

“And though Remi was having work life problems and bad love life with a sharptongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world. ” This, after all the endless meanderings within this essay—partly because I really couldn ’t formulate a thesis that does justice to laughter—points to the unsatisfactory conclusion to this discussion on laughter that I wish to give (forced, in some sense, to give, since an es-say, must say something): Laughter in its purest, at its best, is a fundamental attunement, a certain mode of being which discloses a certain dimension of the world. Since, as we ’ ve seen, laughter is simultaneously unnerving and fortifying, distressing and empowering. It expresses a love for the world around us in exposing the contradictions that abound and the strange details that should be savoured. Striving towards more than mere knowing, but a mattering, an engaging, a vitality in living. Therefore, although laughter—lacking use, risky, pacifying—does not make us happy, it, as the playful engagement with one ’ s surroundings that takes it light-heartedly seriously, is necessary. To compensate for the lack of a substantial conclusion, I’ll end with an aphorism by Nietzsche: “We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh. ”