In the Event of Laughter by Alfie Bown

Author:Alfie Bown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Falstaff knows that laughter’s effects are not entirely consciously deployed, often producing unknown futures and ideologies, and that sometimes we are subjected to the effects of laughter with no agency in the matter: we do not just ‘invent’ laughter, it is ‘invented on us’, as if it has an ‘intriguing’ power of its own. Falstaff also knows that laughter is not just a response but a cause; it is not only that he is the cause of wit in others (making a laughter response, to Falstaff and his jokes, for example) but the cause ‘that wit is’, making laughter something productive and constitutive even though he cannot control its effects as author or comedian. Laughter itself plots, like a conspirator or an intriguer, turning its subjects into marionettes, puppets guided from outside. Laughter shows ideology being imposed, and this can make laughter threatening and dangerous to that very ideology. Althusser commented that ‘ideology never says “I am ideological” ’, but laughter sometimes does.52

The first chapter argued that laughter is not as liberating as it seems, and is involved in controlling and coercing its subjects. This second chapter has argued that if laughter is ideological and productive then it also has the capacity to show things being produced. It is here that its radical edge is found; laughter may be coercive and controlling, but it also has the capacity to show us the structures that it supports coming into being and to reveal how they are put together. In this way, there can be a subversive underside in even the most ideological laughter. The next chapter will develop these observations into a theory of laughter.

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