Studying Laughter Heather Snell This issue marks the end of my five-year term as the lead editor of Jeunesse. I have been with the journal since its inception in 2008 and have, therefore, had an opportunity to see editors come and go over the years. I treasure dearly the time I have spent with them; they have all been amazing. I have taken great pride in the collaborative work we do at the journal and have continually been reminded of its value whenever someone tweets positively about an issue or when a Jeunesse article wins a prize. It is with a mixture of sadness and happiness that I now step away—sadness, because I loved the work and will miss it, and happiness, because I am at no loss as to how to fill the Jeunesse-shaped hole in my weekly schedule (*grin*). Sarah Olive, who joined the Jeunesse editorial board in 2020, is taking over the role of lead editor. Sarah comes to Jeunesse with considerable editorial and academic experience: she is the founding editor of Teaching Shakespeare, a magazine published by the British Shakespeare Association, and serves as an Editorial Advisory Panel member for Palgrave Communications. She has published research on Shakespeare, drama education, the British gothic, the young adult gothic, representations of disability, and university politics and communications. Jeunesse will no doubt move in exciting new directions under her leadership. I look forward to seeing an inevitably different dynamic and shifts in process and protocol that will allow the journal to continue to be responsive to a rapidly changing academic publishing market. That the special issue on laughter is the one with which I end my term as lead editor seems especially fitting given the prominent role laughter has played on the editorial board as we have continually strived to keep up with the sea changes that have occurred in academic publishing over the last decade. Whether editorial board meetings are online or in person, they always involve laughter. Even when the journal was on the brink of financial disaster several years ago, we laughed, lending credence to the popular belief that laughter is a form of release during tough times. When things are not going well, sometimes the only thing to do is laugh; of course, one could choose to cry, but there is something about the [End Page 1] physical act of laughing that provides much-needed release. Laughing triggers transformation. It is almost magical in its ability to move us from despair and hopelessness to euphoria, even in our darkest moments. As an act frequently associated with children, laughter is an ideal topic for a special issue of Jeunesse. Why it has taken so long to launch a special issue on the topic can probably be explained—at least in part—by the lack of seriousness with which laughter tends to be approached and the feeling that studying laughter is somehow blasphemous. To study laughter is, according to many, tantamount to crushing the mirth right out of it. Attesting to the difficulty of studying laughter, more scholars work on humour than laughter. In children's literary studies, for example, there has been considerable discussion about silliness and anarchy in nonsense verse—silliness has itself been described as anarchic—and the abundance of scatological imagery in children's picture books has sparked quite a bit of intellectual discussion. Both studies of nonsense and scatology in young people's texts and cultures tend to draw on the work of Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, whose study of the sixteenth-century French comic writer François Rabelais has been groundbreaking for anyone interested in laughter and the cultural forms that provoke it. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin argued that the festive spirit of medieval carnival permeates Renaissance literature. Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, published in five volumes between 1532 and 1564, is a case in point. The novels capture the folk culture of humour that was so prevalent in the Middle Ages. Such humour revives and renews through a temporary suspension of the norms and hierarchies that normally govern social life. Bakhtin often uses the term "second life" to describe the transformative potential...