ABSTRACT
Satisfactory explanations of laughter have always been notoriously elusive. As Bergson put it, ‘this little problem…has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophical speculation’ (Bergson, 1980:61). Across the centuries, laughter has been variously understood as vice or cowardice, as delight caused by surprise, the product of defamiliarization, a means of averting antisocial conflict, or an extra-linguistic bark signalling the limits of understanding. Aristotle, noting that laughter is exclusive to human beings, believed that an infant could not be considered truly human until it had laughed its first laugh at forty days old. By acknowledging laughter as essentially human, every discussion of it also tends to contain an idea of what being human means. A further phenomenon unifies all theories of laughter: they all take it to be the manifestation of a perfectly serious urge, process, or function, just like Dutch historian Johann Huizinga’s theory of the serious importance of play. Laughter is never just fun, as in all accounts of it the human being is using their laughter to serve a social, psychological, or physiological need. This chapter will survey a number of the most prominent theories of laughter in order to show how this idea, so closely associated with comedy, has been used as a means of understanding human identity.
