Return to search

A Short Introduction to Theories of Humour, the Comic, and Laughter

Establishing a decisive nexus between gender, laughter, and media, this article not only critically discusses the often contradictorily defined concepts of humour, the comic, and laughter but also introduces to the most important theories in these fields with reference to Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, Helmuth Plessner, Anton C. Zijderveld, Judith Butler, Bernhard Greiner, Hans Robert Jauß, Peter L. Berger, and others. Basic concepts such as the “significantly comic” versus the “absolutely comic” or the “comedy of denigration and exclusion” versus the “comedy of valorization and inclusion” are interrogated and the link between comedy, citationality, performativity as well as parody is established. Moreover, this article explores the sociological, psychoanalytical, bodily and theological dimensions to laughter and questions notions such as the carnivalesque and the grotesque. It is argued that the liberating potential of “full laughter” can be understood as the return of the body, of the repressed, and of the Other, and that if it is precisely this ‘other realm’ which ultimately makes laughter possible, laughter simultaneously is humankind’s best means of dealing with it.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:36440
Date10 December 2019
CreatorsHorlacher, Stefan
PublisherBrill | Rodopi
Source SetsHochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion, doc-type:bookPart, info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart, doc-type:Text
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Relation978-90-420-2672-8, 978-90-420-2673-5, 10.1163/9789042026735

Page generated in 0.0017 seconds