Introduction

The great monastic library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose possesses, among a multiplicity of other treasures, a precious and extraordinary relic: the only surviving copy of Aristotle's treatise on comedy. Aristotle's economical, confident declaration that 'no animal laughs save Man' reverberates down the centuries through all that is written on laughter. Following him, for moralists and theologians, writers of books of etiquette, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychoanalysts, laughter has remained a source of faint puzzlement and persistent disquiet. To laugh seems dangerous; and yet, of course, Louis-Ferdinand Celine uses laughter precisely as a weapon. The programme Gerard Toulouse charts for the science of laughter is a very ambitious one, and richly documented. The sheer variety of the Oxford conference was one of its great pleasures, and the event illustrated by example the ways in which laughter is social, contagious, and, perhaps, therapeutic.