Laughing at "others"

Abstract

As a dramatic form, comedy can exist without laughter, but most of the plays that we consider comedies are engines of laughter, and one of the great pleasures of comic theatre is the feeling of exhilaration and release that laughter provides. Despite much theorizing, the causes of laughter and its significance in human life remain a mystery. The impulse to laugh, for one thing, is deeply equivocal. At times, as when we laugh “with” someone, laughter may be a mechanism by which we identify with another human being, a means of psychological and social bonding. At other times, as when we laugh “at” someone, the same physical reaction may be a form of aggressive self-assertion. The former kind of laughter, in which human and societal divisions are dissolved in communal merriment, we might call, loosely following Bakhtin, carnivalesque. The latter, in which such divisions are perversely reinforced, we might call Hobbesian, after Thomas Hobbes, who defined laughter as an expression of superiority, a feeling of “sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.” Both kinds of laughter, curiously, can strengthen certain kinds of social communion: the carnivalesque, by casting wide the net of community, implying that we are all, at some level, one; the Hobbesian, by affirming the superiority of one community in opposition to an individual or group outside it. Romantic and Saturnalian comedy tend towards carnivalesque laughter; satiric comedy, towards Hobbesian.