ABSTRACT
Laughter, some authorities have said, comes from joy. There could hardly be a closer link to happiness, and yet the contested status of laughter in Western culture has often made it a suspect partner. While many societies constrain laughter with social rules, its history in the Christian West has been especially fraught, with critiques from dual directions. Class-based squeamishness about laughter’s bodily contortions goes back to the classical roots of Western thought, while Christianity added religious qualms. A long line of Christian authorities associated laughter chiefly with mockery, a constant activity of the ungodly. Thomas Hobbes’s famous attribution of laughter to a “sudden glory” in superiority gave it an equally negative tinge. Meanwhile, elite commentators poured contempt on excessive laughter as a habit of the lower classes, children, and women. Others, however, saw laughter as a path to health and conviviality, leading us back to happiness. Physicians were especially apt to take this view, along with everyday laughers who didn’t bother themselves with theory. The eighteenth century brought a shift in thinking about laughter that paralleled the Enlightenment shift toward a more worldly view of happiness. Social commentators increasingly valued the social skills involved in eliciting and appreciating laughter, as a boon to general sociability and happiness. In modern times, laughter was increasingly commercialized, for sale in comic consumer products, and individualized, as a “sense of humor” came to be seen as an important social asset.
