History of laughter  

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A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)
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A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)
laughter, microhistory

Mikhail Bakhtin opens his work Rabelais and His World work with a quotation from Alexander Herzen: "It would be extremely interesting to write the history of laughter" (chap.1, p. 59).

One of the primary expressions of the ancient world's conceptions of laughter, is the apocryphal letters of Hippocrates about Democritus (p.66-67). The laughter of Democritus had a philosophical character, being directed at the life of man and at all the vain fears and hopes related to the gods and to life after death. Democritus here made of his laughter a complete conception of the world, a certain spiritual premise of the man who has attained maturity and has awakened. Hippocrates finally perfectly agreed with him (p.66-67).

Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "History of laughter" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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