Essay on Laughter

Elias, Norbert; Parvulescu, Anca

doi:10.1086/689669

Cited by 40 publications

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“…The deflation of our expectations is also the revelation of nature, so that the incongruity consists both in the difference between our expectations and what the comedy delivers and in the difference between culture -'artificiality'and raw nature. 31 Elias thus links Kant's theory of comedy to Bergson's central argument: that comedy is '[s]omething mechanical encrusted on the living'. 32 We can see, then, that eighteenth-century theories of comedy, laughter and humour trackor even help to inauguratethe development of the modern self.…”

Section: Humour As Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Laughter in particular, as Halliwell writes, 'exists at the interface, so to speak, between body and mind, between instinct and intention'. 19 For Norbert Elias, writing in the late nineteenfifties, laughter provides a 'key-problem' 20 : it demands that we reconsider our understanding of the physiology of laughter as an outward expression of an internal state, and thus that we reconsider a sharp distinction between internal states and bodily mechanisms altogether. Affect theory and emotions history are not so readily separable; their mutual object of investigation seems to press for methods that occupy a variety of messy middle grounds.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Humour of Humours: Comedy Theory and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Emotions

Tierney‐Hynes

2020

The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology

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Here, then, I will bring together two broad surveys, necessarily incomplete, that will serve as a kind of mutual commentary. The first, a survey of methodological and theoretical approaches to emotion and to humour in particular, seeks to understand how studies of emotion have pressed us to find new critical methods and to upend critical norms. Examining the claims of emotions history in contrast to various strands of affect theory, I assess the convergences among these approaches. The second survey, of some key late seventeenth-and eighteenth-century discussions of humour, examines in particular the way theories of comedy in this period seize on humour as a critical method. In the eighteenth century, humour could be a critical term of artas in 'humours comedy'and an aspect of the self. Humour serves, in different contexts, as a prescription for playwrights, a description of comic characters, a national diagnosis, and a fundamental perceptive capacity. This survey seeks to understand how humour bridges corporeality and cognition in ways that comment on critical axioms then and now. The tentative suggestion of this chapter is that studies of emotion, historical and theoretical, insistently refuse us methodological certainty.The methods of emotions history have long been established in twentiethcentury critical paradigms. From Norbert Elias, who effectively linked cultural revolutions to emotional dispositions in The Civilizing Process (1939, trans. 1969) to Raymond Williams, who argued in Marxism and Literature (1977) that 'structures of feeling' are the indices of the interpenetration of history and form, and Richard Sennett, who observed that eighteenth-century England was 'a society where intimate feeling is an all-purpose standard of reality', 3 critics across disciplines have agreed that the foundations of cultural materialism relied on a deep recognition of two important truths: that emotion is an essential (perhaps the essential) register of

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Section: Humour As Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

The Humour of Humours: Comedy Theory and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Emotions

Tierney‐Hynes

2020

The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology

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“…An angry manifestation can lead to a reaction in the form of a counterattack or can be meant as an attempt to temper the anger of the other, providing excuses and justifications. Laughter can communicate joy or cruel mockery (Elias, 2017). Feeling guilty can mean that we have not behaved consistently with our values or the fear of being reprimanded in the future for not having done enough for a loved one.…”

Section: Affective Ruptures and Emotional Experiencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective Ruptures: A Pragmatist Approach

Lampredi

2024

Emotion Review

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This article defines a possible pragmatist approach to the sociology of emotions by discussing and delimiting the concept of “affective rupture.” According to this approach, emotions emerge from the breaking of habits in the face of the transformation of situations, producing reflexivity and relational adjustments. The pragmatist approach problematizes the “rhythm” of emotions, made up of ruptures, moments of quiet, adjustments, harmonizations, restorations, and relational revolutions. Rhythm is what emotions pragmatically “do,” ordering and transforming every social situation. This article employs this idea to reinterpret some sociological approaches to emotions and, in parallel, to show how the interdependence between affectivity and irruption of events that involve and upset is constitutive of everyone's social behaviors.

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“…I view these not as competing theories but as directions of thought on laughter that ground current research. Each theory illuminates 'the riddle of laughter' from a particular perspective (Elias, [1956(Elias, [ ] 2017. I briefly explain.…”

Section: Theoretical Background: Studying Laughter As a Social Phenomenonmentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s no joke: The critical power of a laughing chorus

Kravets

2021

Marketing Theory

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There is no known time in history, nor known human community without laughter. Laughter imbues our social life. Laughter dominates our daily interactions, perhaps more visibly so on social media, where it is now a weapon wielded frequently against marketers. Yet, marketing theory paid little attention to laughter as a social phenomenon or a collective consumer (re)action. This article begins to address this neglect through an integrative review of theories of laughter and specifically by introducing Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of a laughing chorus. I engage the notion as a way to understand the internet publics’ rowdy laughter directed at marketing. I show that seemingly nihilistic, irresponsible and discordant laughter is nonetheless an efficacious and notably polyvocal social commentary. To probe further the power of a laughing chorus, I draw on the works of Henri Bergson and Alenka Zupancic and elaborate on laughter as a form of expression that does not depend on reason and argumentation for its effects. I contend that a critical impetus of a laughing chorus may not always be in its content, but in the comic element, centred on repetition. That is, collective, excessive laughter involves a distinct mode of critique, which is not premised on discursive deliberation. I conclude with a reflection on theoretical and methodological opportunities in taking laughter seriously in marketing and consumer culture studies.

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Essay on Laughter

Cited by 40 publications

References 1 publication

The Humour of Humours: Comedy Theory and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Emotions

The Humour of Humours: Comedy Theory and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Emotions

Affective Ruptures: A Pragmatist Approach

It’s no joke: The critical power of a laughing chorus

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