Laughter as Politics

It’s funny because it’s true? Reflections on laughter, deception, and critique

“…Of course, a theoretical study of laughter necessarily touches on these genres, and I will not shy away from discussing, for instance, the impact of Aristophanic Old Comedy on Plato’s account of laughter. But as Bakhtin’s, Plato’s, Hobbes’s, and Nietzsche’s analyses all suggest, and as I and others argue elsewhere, laughter obeys a political logic irreducible to the genres that generate it (Giamario 2018; 2022; Parvulescu 2010, 3–4; 2017, 508). 5 My wager is that theorizing this political logic in terms of deception leads to a philosophically richer and politically more productive conception of laughter’s critical power than the prevailing veridical discourse.…”

“…As Ken Jennings notes, ‘The world that has been delivered to us now seems to have the goal of packing in as many laughs into every second of the day as possible’ (Jennings 2018, 21). Laughter has become an experience through which the polis as a whole constructs, maintains, and transforms its very bounds and contours (Giamario 2018; 2022).…”