ABSTRACT
The Swiss physician Felix Platter could hardly have laughed more differently than Cellini, though they were contemporaries. Platter’s autobiography paints a world of gentler laughter, among upwardly mobile intellectuals and their families. For Platter and his friends, laughter came in scenes of courtship, family life, and camaraderie. Laughing out loud brought people together, with some of the merriest laughter erupting when the joke was on Platter himself. Laughter here served to cement relationships and ease social interactions, even across differences of gender, status, and religion. The defenders of laughter, including many doctors and educated humanists like Platter himself, pointed to such benign effects. In their view laughter was good for you—for the health of the individual body and mind, and also for society at large.
