Paradoxal, le rire de l’horreur constitue cependant une donnée majeure de l’expérience théâtrale contemporaine. Il procède d’une mutation du comique qui en vient à exprimer la violence au lieu de l’édulcorer. Sur la scène anglaise d’après l’abolition de la censure (1968), le comique se fait miroir des angoisses de la société et l’horreur, mise en scène de façon de plus en plus naturaliste, fait rire le public tout en suscitant un profond malaise qui interroge la position du spectateur. Mais, dans un mouvement inverse et encore plus dérangeant parce qu’insidieux, l’humour se fait aussi vecteur d’effroi quand l’horreur est tue ou euphémisée, renvoyant alors au public une interrogation profondément éthique sur l’humanité de son rire. Ces mutations esthétiques s’insèrent dans une profonde déstabilisation de la nature même de la comédie et de son idéologie optimiste et humaniste : si certains sous-genres (la farce, la comedy of manners, la city comedy, la parodie) représentent volontiers des situations horribles, la comédie est structurellement défigurée quand elle incorpore une ontologie horrible, quand sa forme n’implique plus le progrès mais l’arbitraire et quand son dénouement se fait explicitement dissonant. L’horreur, défigurant de manière ludique la forme de la comédie, devient un principe poétique qui renouvelle le genre, et en particulier les archétypes comiques inoffensifs pour les rendre terribles. Car c’est à l’aune de la tragédie défaillante que se refonde la comédie et le rire s’y étouffe, lesté d’une conscience du tragique soulignée par la culpabilité inhérente à de nombreux éclats de rire, mais surtout par la dérision des valeurs tragiques et la relativisation de l’absolu dans l’humour. Dans ces conditions, le rire devient un moyen d’accéder à la puissance des émotions tragiques, et la catharsis se redéfinit, s’éloignant de la traditionnelle purification des passions pour devenir une réintensification de leur pouvoir humanisant. / Paradoxical as it may be, laughing at horror is a major feature of the contemporary theatrical experience. It emerges from a shift in the comic mode which now expresses violence instead of muffling it. In the aftermath of the abolition of censorship in the United Kingdom (1968), this comic mode has held a mirror up to society’s fears and horror has been staged in a more and more naturalistic way, so as to make the audience laugh while unsettling them, questioning the very position of the spectators. However, in a converse and even more disturbing way, humour has become a way to appal them, subduing horror instead of underlining it and thereby deeply questioning them on the humanity of laughter. Those aesthetic shifts take part in a general process of undermining comedy’s humanistic optimistic ideology; even though some subgenres (namely farce, city comedy, comedy of manners or parody) easily stage horrible scenes, comedy is structurally defaced when it includes an ontology of horror, when its shape does not express progress but arbitrariness and when its ending is explicitly unhappy. Playing on the structure of comedy to the point of defacing it, horror becomes a poetic principle that renews the genre and especially the comic archetypes, making them dreadful instead of harmless. It is indeed tragedy’s failure that becomes the measure of this renewal of comedy, as laughter gets stifled by the tragic consciousness that tinges many laughs with guilt, caused by the way tragic values are ridiculed and tragic absoluteness belittled by humour. In those conditions, laughing turns into a means for the spectator to surreptitiously feel the power of tragic emotions; the experience redefines catharsis, no longer a purification of emotions but a new way to reach their humanising power.

Lee, Tin Yan Grace. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [106-111]). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Laughter and Man --- p.15 / Chapter Chapter 2: --- Laughter and Man's Obligation to Persist in Beckett's Endgame --- p.37 / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Laughter and Self-Knowledge in Pinter's The Birthday Party --- p.68 / Conclusion --- p.100

Thesis (Ph. D. in Spanish)--Vanderbilt University, Dec. 2007. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Scholarly research on comical popular theatre is rare in the Swedish context even though the genre has attracted large audiences throughout the 20th century. Nils Poppe is one of the greatest Swedish actors in the comical genre and he is famous for his playful acting style. With my Master’s dissertation I aim to shed some light on both the genre and this great actor. Another aim of this Master’s dissertation is to gain understanding of what causes the audience’s laughter experiencing Nils Poppe’s comical acting. To understand the audience response to the comical acting I need to study the communication between the actor and the beholders.   In doing this I use Bert O. States phenomenological approach, in which he divides the communication into three modes in which the beholder experiences the action. In each of these modes I then use complementary concepts and theories to analyze the audience’s laughter. My analysis starts with the Representational mode in which the focus is on the fiction of the play. Using semiotics, I discuss Poppe’s characters as a stock character related to the Commedia dell’arte character Harlequin and other clown characters, which are imbedded in the audience’s memory. With examples from a play I show why the audience laugh in different scenes.  In the next chapter, I analyze the Self-expressive mode in which the artist at stage is in focus. While experiencing the fiction of the play the audience simultaneously experiences the reality on stage. The actor is present and Poppe’s real face, body and voice is affecting the audience’s response. The final mode is the Collaborative mode in which the collaboration between the actor and beholder is analyzed. The direction of the play and how Poppe interacts with the audience is increasing the impression of presence among the audience. In his acting, Poppe breaks the theatrical conventions of the separation between fiction and reality, and in improvisations, he challenges both the audience and fellow actor’s notion of theatre. The result of the study implies that some laughter can’t be explained just by studying each of these modes separately. When the character leaves the fictional play and acts within the audience reality, or when the actor on stage is understood as part of the fiction an incongruity is created that tends to make the audience laugh.

The drole de roman gathers works by Marcel Ayme, Albert Cohen and Raymond Queneau, French novelists who belong to the same generation, share common readers and inspiration and, most of all, a specific vision: the nonserious. Their novels draw from the most obvious manifestations of the comical tradition (farce, burlesque) to its most subtle (irony, parody). In their works, laughter does not occupy a secondary position nor does it simply provide some reading impressions. In fact, laughter is often expressed by the characters and narrators themselves, whose sense of mischeviousness demonstrates the Rabelaisian joy of body and soul. / Besides, the drole is not restricted to its usual comical characteristics. In the prospect of literary history, it also refers to what stands apart from the realistic conventions inherited from Balzac and Zola. In other words, the drole is made of antirealism, merveilleux and fantasy. Thus, Ayme, Cohen and Queneau put forward their own response to the mimetic function of the 19th century realistic novel. Instead of renouncing the power of fiction, as Gide and Valery will often suggest, instead of denouncing its falseness, the three novelists give fiction even greater powers. / Based on the conclusions of the history of the novel and on studies concerning various aspects of its construction (the relation between reality and fiction, the conception of character and of its place in the community, the forms of the plot), this thesis wishes to shed light on the role and value of laughter through the study of three major themes: comedy, community and enchantment.

Medicine has been called a science, as well as an art or a craft, among other terms that express aspects of its practical nature. Medicine is not the abstract pursuit of knowledge. Medical researchers and clinical practitioners aim primarily to help people. As a first approximation then, given its practical focus on the person, the most important question in medicine is: what works? To answer that question, however, we need to understand how we know what works. What are the standards, methods and limits of medical knowledge? That is the central focus and subject of this inquiry: how we know what works in medicine. To explore medical knowledge and its limits, this thesis examines the common notion that laughter is the best medicine. Focusing on laughter provides a robust case study of how we know what works in medicine; it also, in part, reveals the thin, perhaps even non-existent, distinction in medicine between empirically-grounded knowledge and intuition. As there is no single academic discipline devoted to laughter in medicine, the first chapter situates and charts the course of this unusual project and explains why inquiry into laughter in medicine matters. In the following chapters, we encounter claims from distinguished sources that laughter and humor are the best medicine. These claims are examined from a variety of perspectives including not only the orthodox view of evidence-based medicine, but also from narrative, evolutionary and complexity views of medicine. The rarely explored serious negative side of laughter is also examined. No view provides a firm foundation for belief in laughter medicine. A general conclusion from this inquiry is that none of the approaches effectively tame the complexity of medical phenomena; indeed each starkly reveals a greater complexity than found at first glance. A narrower conclusion is that providing a basis for claims about laughter in medicine poses its own specific challenges. A third conclusion is that, as things stand, none of the existing approaches seems up to the task of determining whether something such as laughter is the best medicine.

Medicine has been called a science, as well as an art or a craft, among other terms that express aspects of its practical nature. Medicine is not the abstract pursuit of knowledge. Medical researchers and clinical practitioners aim primarily to help people. As a first approximation then, given its practical focus on the person, the most important question in medicine is: what works? To answer that question, however, we need to understand how we know what works. What are the standards, methods and limits of medical knowledge? That is the central focus and subject of this inquiry: how we know what works in medicine. To explore medical knowledge and its limits, this thesis examines the common notion that laughter is the best medicine. Focusing on laughter provides a robust case study of how we know what works in medicine; it also, in part, reveals the thin, perhaps even non-existent, distinction in medicine between empirically-grounded knowledge and intuition. As there is no single academic discipline devoted to laughter in medicine, the first chapter situates and charts the course of this unusual project and explains why inquiry into laughter in medicine matters. In the following chapters, we encounter claims from distinguished sources that laughter and humor are the best medicine. These claims are examined from a variety of perspectives including not only the orthodox view of evidence-based medicine, but also from narrative, evolutionary and complexity views of medicine. The rarely explored serious negative side of laughter is also examined. No view provides a firm foundation for belief in laughter medicine. A general conclusion from this inquiry is that none of the approaches effectively tame the complexity of medical phenomena; indeed each starkly reveals a greater complexity than found at first glance. A narrower conclusion is that providing a basis for claims about laughter in medicine poses its own specific challenges. A third conclusion is that, as things stand, none of the existing approaches seems up to the task of determining whether something such as laughter is the best medicine.

Thèse - Université de Paris. / "Errata": [4] p. inserted. Bibliography: p. [756]-776.

De Nodier à Baudelaire, nombre de romantiques ont clamé leur désenchantement ou leur mélancolie ; on les a trop souvent pris au mot, oubliant « la puissance d'être à la fois soi et un autre » qui est la leur. Confrontés à un réel en voie d’uniformisation qu’ils méprisent ainsi qu’aux tourments d’une intériorité qu’ils découvrent duelle et déchirée, ils font du rire et de l’imagination, « reine des facultés », les leviers d’une résistance et d’une créativité renouvelée, cette dernière s’appuyant sur un recyclage humoristique de formes oubliées et visant à restaurer une sensibilité perdue tout en l’adaptant à leur époque. Ils inventent le fantastique moderne et font du rire le principe de son écriture. Le rire, paradoxal, y prend en charge les contradictions du réel et du langage, l’oblicité de l’ironie en révélant la réversibilité et la polysémie, dans un esprit malicieux et retors qui fait circuler partout, jusque sous les apparences les plus macabres les serpenteaux d’artifice du Witz. Le rire des fantastiqueurs n’est pas un rire « réduit » mais un rire intériorisé, un rire galvanisé par la découverte de l'épaisseur et de l'étrangeté des choses, un rire qui contribue à donner naissance à la bienveillance distanciée de l’humour moderne / From Nodier to Baudelaire, numerous romantic poets and writers claimed their disillusionment in human existence or their melancholy. Much too often, they have been taken at their words, one neglecting the ''power to be oneself and someone else at one and the same time” which was theirs and constituted their dual nature. Facing up a reality on its way to standardization, which they despised, as well astorments of their inner self which they experienced and felt as agonizingly dual and tornapart, they turned laughter and imagination, being “the most dignified faculty of mind”, into power of resistance and renewed creativity, the latter being based on a humorous adjustment and re-use of old forms, highlighting this way the revival of lost sensitivities while updating these to their time.They were the inventors of the modern fantastic literature and made out of laughter the principle of this new form of writing. There, laughter, paradoxical, takes on and assumes the internal contradictions of reality, the oblique and indirect nature of irony by disclosing the reversibility and the polysemy of their surrounding world, in a mischievous and cunning spirit which disseminates the pharaoh's serpent fireworks of the Witz all over the place, and which emit sparks even from the most macabre appearances such as the grim reaper of death.The laughter of the fantastic authors is not a "subdued" laughter, a restrained laughter, but an inner laughter, exalted by the consciousness of the density and weirdness as well as through the uncanny nature of things, a laughter which contributes to the emergenceof modern humor, because it takes a step back while paying benevolent attention to the other

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Esta dissertação analisa marcadores sociais produtores de hierarquia, desigualdade e discriminação entre sujeitos LGBT na cidade de Maputo. A análise das intersecções de gênero, raça, classe social, idade e sexualidade demonstra que os sujeitos LGBT em contextos de sociabilidades, e mesmo nas relações sociais, constroem hierarquias e formas de discriminação, que por sua vez geram sentimentos tais como a humilhação e o desprezo. O estudo discute também de que maneira esses marcadores posicionam determinados sujeitos LGBT na dinâmica de sociabilidade e preferências sexuais no pólo de valorizados, relegando outros ao pólo de desvalorizados. O humor, a jocosidade, e a informalidade observados reforçam os marcadores sociais das diferenças entre os sujeitos LGBT, e ainda informam moralidades por meio de um discurso irônico. A pesquisa é de carácter etnográfico e baseou-se nos métodos e técnicas tradicionais da antropologia: observação-participante e conversas informais com sujeitos LGBT; e incluiu ainda análise de documentos. Um objectivo secundário desta dissertação é contribuir para a construção da história do movimento LGBT moçambicano, que ainda está por ser realizada e o desenho de tal história faz parte do levantamento realizado. / This dissertation analyzes social markers that produce hierarchy, inequality and discrimination among LGBT individuals in Maputo. The analysis of gender and its intersection with race, social class, age and sexuality demonstrates that LGBT individuals in the context of social relations build hierarchies and forms of discrimination, which in turn generate feelings such as humiliation and the contempt. The study also discusses how these markers place certain LGBT subjects, in the dynamics of sociability and sexual preferences, in a valued position, relegating others to the opposite position. The humor, jocoseness, and the observed informality reinforce the social markers of the differences between LGBT individuals, and also inform morality through an ironic discourse. The research is ethnographic and was based on the traditional methods and techniques of anthropology: participant observation and informal conversations with LGBT individuals; and even included document analysis. A secondary objective of this dissertation is to contribute to the construction of the history the Mozambican LGBT movement, which is yet to be held - and the design of such a story is part of the conducted survey.