Kind Of Laughter Research Articles

HOMER: ἄσβεστος γέλως (două episoade: Iliada, I, 597; Odiseea VIII, 459)

I have often wondered, like many others, where the expression “Homeric laughter” comes from and what is hidden behind it. The spectacular career of the expression, which naturally does not appear in the Homeric epics, can be traced right back to the Iliad and Odyssey. I have insisted on two episodes in which the expression occurs (ἄσβεστος γέλως), one at the end of book I of the Iliad, the second in the Odyssey, book VIII. The gods are involved, Hephaestus in both situations, Ares and Aphrodite in the episode of the Odyssey, and people are also involved for whom this kind of laughter is not characteristic. What is Homeric laughter? The classical expression is ἄσβεστος γέλως, it can be translated by “inextinguishable” or “irrepressible mirth”. The phrase seems to come in English from German – “Homerisches Gelächter”, “unauslöschliches Gelächter” and in German from French: “le rire homérique”, as it appears for the first time in the memoirs of Baroness d’Oberkirck: “le rire inextinguible”. Homeric laughter is, therefore, “inextinguishable”, “unquenchable”, we owe the Latin formula to Ovid, the one from Metamorphoses - superi risere. As for Homer, we know he had no good reason to laugh, Homer couldn’t laugh in a Homeric manner anyway.

What kind of laughter?

Abstract The article examines the pragmatic functions of the Hebrew graphic laughter marker “hhh” in a particularly turbulent public-political discursive arena – online readers’ comments to Facebook posts by the two leading contenders for the post of Israeli prime minister during the 2020 election campaign, Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz. We argue that “hhh” fulfills three functions dependent on its co-text, textual position, and length: (1) contempt marker – conveying contempt, ridicule, or disgust, towards a previous comment or post, their authors, or the associated political wing; (2) intention marker – signaling the employment of pragmatic strategies in the comment; and (3) interpretation marker – indicating the deciphering of pragmatic strategies in a previous post or comment. The findings indicate that in all three categories “hhh” is used mainly to taunt the rival political wing, at times by creating an alliance with other commenters at the expense of their common rivals.

Fondements socio-politiques et économiques de la tradition satirique

<p>Satire is a literary genre with esthetic value determined by laughter. Every kind of laughter is specific for different periods of economic and social development. The forms of material production underlie the perception of the comic. Satirical traditions are intrinsic to national ideological systems. Satire commits seditious attacks against social ideologies. It influences the politics and the politics influences the satire which is only possible with a certain level of sociopolitical development of a society. Satirical tradition can be formed and established only at conditions of democratic political tradition, otherwise it takes perverted shapes.</p>

Når militæret skriver krigshistorier

Christine Strandmose Toft: “When the Military Writes War Stories. A Reading of David Abrams’ Fobbit”This article examines David Abram’s novel Fobbit (2012), a satirical comedy about Chance Gooding who works as a public affairs officer in the Army. First part of the article concerns the representation of the military’s attempt to represent war and asks why it is of paramount importance to the military to control the public’s view of the Iraq War. The second part considers the novel as meta-representation and discusses the kind of laughter it produces and its critical potential.

Apes and japes: Laughter and animality in the Miller’s Tale

This article argues that the humour of The Miller’s Tale is often associated with ideas of laughter as liberating and ‘human.’ Whilst ‘humour’ is a term often applied to apparently ‘civilized’ comedy, we seem to associate the medieval with more basic kinds of laughter, often called ‘buffoonery’ or ‘mirth,’ which seem more animalistic. However, The Miller’s Tale presents complex forms of humour that contest many of our assumptions not only about medieval culture, but also about laughter and its functions. The comedy of the tale works against idealism and chivalric pomp, but rather than a humour that involves asserting the basic human state underneath all this performance, this comedy shows us how laughter plays a key role in establishing conceptions of humanity. If Chaucer’s laughter is to be considered in relation to traditions of comedy at all, it should be discussed in terms of comedy’s ideological power to establish social hierarchies, rather than as a celebration of the natural animal in us all, akin to Greek Old Comedy and buffoonery. Whilst Chaucer’s humour has been read as reflecting Bakhtinian ideas of comedy, here it is shown to be distinctly un-Bakhtinian.

La menzogna irriverente. Appunti sulla ricezione di Sterne nella narrativa umoristica del Ventennio

The article aims to analyze the way humorous authors read Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy Gentleman in the years of the fascist dictatorship. They tried, in fact, to recover the comic pattern of the XVIII century masterpiece, and mainly its metatextual and parodic kind of humour, that made it famous as the champion of the antinovels.In Italy, till Pirandello, these aspects of Sterne’s humour were not as particularly appreciated as the sentimental narrative paradigm, because of many reasons linked to our specific historical and cultural background. In the «Ventennio», instead, authors like Achille Campanile, Giovanni Mosca, Giovannino Guareschi, and others, used this comic-parodic approach to ridicule the whole panorama of serialized and popular literature; thriller, romance and adventure novels , with all their characters, structures and plots, became the main target of a new kind of laughter, spread by humorous novels and newspapers.The result of this demystifying action, that showed literature in its dimension of falsehood, was the development of a new kind of humour in the Italian literary tradition, but also of a kind of uncritical entertainment, essentially coherent with the fascist propaganda and tolerated by the censorship.

The Function of Laughter in Shahnameh in the Light of Bakhtin’s Theory

This study examines the narrative approach of Shahnameh by Ferdowsi based on Bakhtin’s dialogism. The logic of dialogue, a narrative that describes the relationship between different views through dialogue and interaction and considers dialogue as the only way of communication. Dialogism is supplemented by concepts such as "polyphony", "the other voice" and "Carnival". One of the necessary constituents of carnivalistic life is laughter. In Shahnameh there are three kinds of laughter, one of which is considered closer to Bakhtin’s laughter; it is a laughter that causes ridicule and humiliation. Other types of laughter are those of joy and an analogy of nature. In this article the carnivalistic laughter and laughter in Shahnameh are compared with each other to find out the correspondence between dialogism and Shahnameh. In this study, we attempt to study the word "laughter" and its derivatives in Shahnameh using descriptive-analytic method and evaluate it on the basis of Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, and also find out its similarities and differences with Bakhtin's carnivalistic laughter.

Burning effigies with Bakhtinian laughter

The hanging or burning of effigies as an expression of dissent is a well-established genre of playful political protest. It is enacted in a variety of ways, accessing the conventions of various traditional rituals and social practices, and can function either as a progressive force demanding change, or repressively in seeking to enforce the existing order. Building on a close reading of media images of effigy protests from over the world, I relate the employed strategies of reversal and debasement and the grotesque aesthetics of these dummies to Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. I trace the different kinds of laughter that emerge during the effigy protests and explore the complicated relationship between laughter and violence inherent in these performed images of violent death.

Laughter as Immanent Life-Affirmation: Reconsidering the educational value of laughter through a Bakhtinian lens

In this article I try to conceive a new approach towards laughter in the context of formal schooling. I focus on laughter in so far as it is a bodily response during which we are entirely delivered to uncontrollable, spasmodic reactions. To see the educational relevance of this particular kind of laughter, as well as to understand why laughter is often dealt with in a very negative way in pedagogical contexts, this phenomenon should be carefully distinguished from humor or amusement. I build my argument for a smaller part on the basis of conceptual analysis, and to a greater extent on Bakhtin’s work on the transition from Medieval folk culture to Modern civilized culture, in which he claims that a reduction from laughing as a strongly physical experience to mere forms of amusement or humor actually implies that laughter no longer possesses its inherent equalizing and communizing potential. In a sense, laughter forms a threat to any organization of social existence according to similarities and differences in identity and position, and this explains why we usually try to suppress it, or why we try to render it functional in view of the continuation of a societal regime or pedagogical order. More positively formulated, laughter may be said to have an intrinsic educational meaning, because it allows a significant transformation of individual and collective existence.

Only when I laugh? Notes on the becoming interview

This paper starts from the observation that particularly rewarding parts of a set of research interviews were all accompanied by laughter. The interviews in question inquired into organizational practice as sites for individual and collective ‘becoming’, conceived as a set of ongoing authoring acts situated in everyday work. The research interview should be considered amongst those events where such authoring takes place. Interviews constitute events of understanding within the hermeneutics of becoming. Based on two exemplifying strips of dialogues from my interviews, I identify and discuss three kinds of laughter. ‘Positioning laughter’ has the function of affirming authoring acts, welcoming elaboration and creating a general atmosphere of trust. ‘Resonating laughter’ addresses a form of pattern recognition that I suggest amounts to the tuning‐in to an unutterable ‘we’. The function of resonating laughter is that it marks and celebrates this emerging understanding and plants the seeds of a prolonged interpretive effort. ‘Liberating laughter’ addresses and potentially releases from constraints in the event of understanding: whether that be in patterns of the interview as a social event, in prior understanding or in investments into self‐conceptions. The overall function of laughter is that it may enhance implicit interpretation and maintain an open dialectic in understanding; both qualities of particular relevance in becoming interviews.

Quand Dieu rit

When God laughs. What kind of laughter does God laugh ? No less than thirteen Hebrew radicals are used to express laughter in the Old Testament corpus. Using a detailed examination of these radicals and a schematic presentation of their interrelationships, Daniel Lys shows that God’s laugh, in the Old Testament, gives voice to anything from joy to sarcasm.

LAUGHTER, POWER, AND MOTIVATION IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION1

What is the legitimate use of power in religious education? Laughter can help us answer this question. First, we will look at the history of laughter and its relation to freedom. Second, four models of laughter will be described and evaluated. Third, we will discuss how it feels for order to emerge out of chaos in human beings and what kind of laughter emerges from that experience. Finally, the rediscovery of intrinsic motivation will be narrated and implications drawn to guide our teaching and learning. 1Deep gratitude is expressed to the Dean, Clergy, Staff, and Congregation of St. John's Cathedral, Denver, Colorado, where this paper was developed during Advent, 1997, when I was their Theologian in Residence.

400: Coming Home

400: Coming Home DENNIS LEE You are still on the highway and the great light of noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of laughter, the cars pound south. Over your shoulder the scrub-grass, the fences, the fields wait patiently as though someone believed in them. The light has laid it upon them. One crow scrawks. The edges take care of themselves, there is no strain, you can almost hear it, you inhabit it.

EFFECT OF LAUGHTER ON MUSCLE TONE

Laughter may be defined as the manifestation of the combination of bodily phenomena (such as the rapid deep inspiration, the forcible jerky expiration, the utterance of inarticulate sounds, the facial distortion, the shaking of the sides) that forms the instinctive expression of mirth or of a sense of something ludicrous and that can be produced by certain physical sensations, such as tickling. There are, according to Sully,1different kinds of laughter, which may perhaps be classified into two general types: (1) the elementary type, unaccompanied by the perception of the ludicrous or laughable, and (2) forms accompanied by an intellectual discernment of the ludicrous or laughable in the object exciting laughter. The first type occurs mainly, though not entirely, in children. This type of laughter is seen on tickling, on joy (such as release from restraint, dismissal from school, etc.), on receiving some desired object, at play or during