Uncovering an archive of laughter, from the forbidden giggle to the
explosive guffaw.
Most of our theories of laughter are not concerned with laughter.
Rather, their focus is the laughable object, whether conceived of as the
comic, the humorous, jokes, the grotesque, the ridiculous, or the
ludicrous. In Laughter, Anca Parvulescu proposes a return to the
materiality of the burst of laughter itself. She sets out to uncover an
archive of laughter, inviting us to follow its rhythms and listen to its
tones. Historically, laughter--especially the passionate burst of
laughter--has often been a faux pas. Manuals for conduct, abetted by
philosophical treatises and literary and visual texts, warned against
it, offering special injunctions to ladies to avoid jollity that was too
boisterous. Returning laughter to the history of the passions,
Parvulescu anchors it at the point where the history of the grimacing
face meets the history of noise. In the civilizing process that leads to
laughter's "falling into disrepute," as Nietzsche famously put it, we
can see the formless, contorted face in laughter being slowly corrected
into a calm, social smile. How did the twentieth century laugh?
Parvulescu points to a gallery of twentieth-century laughers and friends
of laughter, arguing that it is through Georges Bataille that the
century laughed its most distinct laugh. In Bataille's wake, laughter
becomes the passion at the heart of poststructuralism. Looking back at
the century from this vantage point, Parvulescu revisits four of its
most challenging projects: modernism, the philosophical avant-gardes,
feminism, and cinema. The result is an overview of the twentieth century
as seen through the laughs that burst at some of its most convoluted
junctures.
