WHAT IS LAUGHTER

A Tickle Me Elmo doll, the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962, an interminably looped .gif file of Natalie Portman laughing at the 2011 Golden Globe Awards, the “laughing network” of sentient plants in Joan Slonczewski’s SF novel The Highest Frontier, an ink printout of a fMRI scan of a brain in the moment of laughter, the brutal Italian giallo film The House With Laughing Windows, the online obsession with identifying gaping happy faces in inanimate objects, and the canned laughter or “Laff Box” premiered by CBS on The Hank McClune Show in 1950.

Following Aristotle’s claim that laughter is an “ensouling mechanism,” the anthropocentrically-minded field of humor studies has built itself upon the assumption that laughter is an exclusively “human” response to humor. Humor studies busies itself with producing rigid taxonomies of humor, from slapstick to satire, to rationally explain why we laugh. Instead of asking “What is funny to us?” this blog begins with a different question: what is laughter? Disassociated from humor (studies) and considered as an object in itself, the truly weird nature of laughter - as an irrational, involuntary, and disruptive force - comes into view. 

My first claim is that the everydayness of laughter, its fleshy domesticity, has obscured its fundamental unintelligibility. By selecting moments of laughter decontextualized from humor, I hope to make visible the basic withdrawal of laughter from rational explanation or scientific study.  The Elmo doll, the Tanganyika population, the severed images of Portman, the canned laughter tapes - they laugh without reason, over and over, until the batteries run out. 

My second claim is that laughter disrupts being; it shakes us from our selves. For a laughing moment, Elmo becomes a corporeal presence, Natalie Portman becomes a flat, repetitious tone, a house becomes a psychotic killer, the Tanganyika people become a single body, the recorded laughter of disappeared, deceased people activates laughter in an armchair audience of a CBS sitcom.  Laughter reveals itself as at once mechanical and corporeal, archival and non-calculable, contagious and alienating, inanimate and convulsive.

This blog argues that the dilation of perspective from human humor to alien laughter opens up a new philosophical space in which laughter, far from proving our humanity or reinforcing our status as rational subjects, serves to disrupt these anthropocentric ontological presumptions, and map a new philosophical terrain, in which objects, subjects, things, and humans are in perpetual withdrawal from, and active relation with, one another.