Postmodern laughter as an anti-foundational agent

Abstract

Laughter has been viewed as an ironical tool in the postmodern world of subversion, playfulness, and parody. The contemporary age of postmodernism has a great comic spirit in its trends which challenges the established foundations. The present study is an attempt to demonstrate the function of laughter as an anti-foundational agent from a postmodernist perspective in the two novels, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and The Joke by Milan Kundera. The essence of anti-foundational laughter has been explored through the lens of three theories of laughter; The Incongruity Theory by Arthur Schopenhauer, The Anti-Mechanical Theory by Henri Bergson, The Super-Laughter Theory by Friedrich Nietzsche. The selected novels have been analysed to highlight the function of laughter as a powerful source of challenge, distortion, and change which help challenge the religious, political and social foundations. It has shown a new perspective of laughter and has opened new facades of postmodernism in traditional theories of laughter as well as in the selected novels.