“Even God has his blips.”
Victor Hugo
The Laughing Man

One surprise we get from reading ancient treaties on laughter is the affirmation that physical deformity naturally provokes laughter. Nowadays, we cannot subscribe to the following kinds of phrases: We also find a reason for mockery in deformities or in physical faults; Gaiety is naturally unleashed at the sight of disabilities...

Some examples
• “Bodily deformities and faults give […] quite a good reason for mockery”: Cicero, De Oratore, II, LVII, 239;
• Where amateurs of scoffing are the victims: “Why are the most imperfect people customarily the most mocking? We see that those who have the most clearly apparent faults, for example, those who are lame, one-eyed, hunchbacked, or have been affronted in public are particularly inclined to mocking others; since, by wanting to see everyone else as disgraced as them, they are delighted by the troubles that happen to them, and they think that they deserve them.” Descartes, Les passions de l’âme, art.17.
• All deformity catches ones eye, because it's out of the ordinary. The deformity that is nothing but laughable makes us laugh with a sort of disdain for the deformed person, this is the pleasure of spite; and with a sort of esteem that we’ve thought about for ourselves, that’s the pleasure of self-esteem.” (Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts reduits à un même principe -1746, IIIe partie, “De la comédie.)
• Let us remind ourselves of the “inextinguishable laugh” (asbestos gêlos) of the “blessed gods” at the sight of the Lame Hépaïstos in the role of the cupbearer. (Iliade, I, 598-600)
Beyond today’s obvious moral facts (infra : chapter 14 : Moral and Handicap) these judgements indicate to us that laughter is implicated in an elementary yet fundamental way in the recognition of the human form.

Laughter is associated with child-learning and the ratification of what an adult already knows. As a bonus to education, it consecrates the acquisition of a small number of shapes and attitudes that society retains about the potentialities of the body and mind. Repetition, prediction and imitation are good for us as it is in this way that we learn. If laughter is primarily linked to the recognition of human society and the learning of its laws, it could be analysed ontogenetically (supra) like the gratification that nature grants to this indeterminate being that is programmed for learning – “By nature a cultural being” according to the words of the biologist Arnold Gehlen – when he discovered and recognised the laws of his society. “Everything we see that is ugly, deformed, dishonest, indecent, improper and unsuitable, stimulates laughter in us” Joubert states (op. cit. p 16). In other words, what is “beautiful”, “normal,” “honest”, “decent”, “proper” and “suitable’, the “ordinary forms” in a well-ordered society create neither surprise nor rejection since they constitute the “common values” of any given society.

However, we have already noted that these “common values” are expressed in an ordinary form of laughter, not as a denial, but as participation, a neutral laughter that consists of laughing at (almost) nothing and which indicates the agreement and the contentment of the community. In the case in point, the message (empty) is indeed the massage, a sort of jacuzzi where the spirit of the group is noisily externalised. Risus index sui. Laughter, as a method of creating society, is part of those actions “that incite us to imitate those similar to us”. “At the sight of someone yawning, we yawn; and sometimes we piss for company” notes Joubert (op. cit. p. 37). We are the “same” if we laugh at the same thing. Here the circle is a reverberating chamber of communal laughter: for example things we obviously have in common, like a round of applause (a public proclamation) du ban (of the communal spirit). Robert Antelme, a prisoner in Buchenwald reports: “Even Bortlick laughs with another meister. So, everybody can laugh. But if I approach him to carry a part, he stops laughing and it’s him that comes towards us and we also stop laughing. We can laugh at the same time, but not together. To laugh with him, would be to admit that we understand something in the same way, and have the same meaning. But their lives and our lives have a completely opposite meaning. If we laugh, we laugh about things that make us turn pale. If they laugh, they laugh about things we hate.” (L’espèce humaine, 1957) Laughing together is proof of belonging.

Specifically, laughter is a reward that helps reassurance, because the truth, partial or partial, or “disabled”, is exposed to reality. We say “serious like a pope”; such a character, like Vico or other agelastes, who are entirely and definitively programmed, cannot, should not nor have cause to laugh. When laughter, like a game, bathes in this hilarious and anaesthetic-like heady fume that allows us to learn, seriousness, this armour of fools as Montesquieu said, cuts off our access to the forge of truth. He who possesses knowledge has no need at all for this infantile pleasure nor this reassurance, nor of this miniature world that is contained in the neotenic bubble, where the bonuses to discovery and rediscovery. Set in stone, enlisted in the brain, the truth remains stony-faced.

The cognitive vigil is a permanent alarm. The brain is constantly dealing with the flux of information that it receives from the different sensory organs. Reality is made up of an already encoded cerebral construction that testifies to the reality of a limb, be it “phantom” (an emblematic illusion of kinaesthetic errors according to Descartes, in his trial of “prejudices of the senses” and in his research into the “seeds of true and unchanging natures”). Ordinary knowledge grips reality into a network of accumulated experiences and certitudes. Silent coenaesthesia that continuously says to me "all is well" testifies to this fact by an act that maps out a predictable world. Laughter, be it automatic, irrepressible or programmed (like Comedy) allows us to tolerate and to (ideally) erase or suppress the things that disturb our obvious anthropological facts. Here suddenly is a comical figure in my field of vision, a caricature of humanity. After an infinitesimal minute of astonishment and with no real reflection as to why, I burst out laughing. No! It’s not true! It is indeed a man, but he's all at sixes and sevens. What a joy I get from recognising this. I have found again, astounded and thrown from my certitudes from this appearance, the security of my form and the contentment of my own society after having lost them for a minute. Yet here is, more critically, an individual who, by taking himself seriously and giving himself over for the expression of humanity, contradicts and upsets my truth… I guffaw loudly (or I laugh up my sleeve). I laugh at things that displease me, and as this pleases me, I cancel out what does actually displease me. These examples, taken on an obviously larger spectrum, show how laughter as a sanction of success, can be mobilised as a euphoric denial of a contrary reality and notably to help us confront an adversary. This ambivalent nature of what is laughable (no but yes; denial and reassurance) is noted by Joubert: “Something that is ridiculous is both pleasurable and sad: there is a pleasure in what we find to be unworthy or pitiful, and there is no shame nor evil in what we deem to be important [...] there is sadness as all ridiculous results from ugliness and disappointment. The heart griefs about such a villainy, by feeling pain, narrows and tightens.” (op. cit. p. 88) But the superiority of the diagnosis of laughter (and of laughter on the analysis: vide infra) is, more precisely, insensibility, the absence of compassion (the heart dilates and doesn’t “narrow”). This is the condition that Aristotle picked out, citing as an example the Comedy mask: it is ugly and deformed without expressing pain. It does not solicit sharing: it’s nothing but an ugly so-and-so, a pleasant scarecrow of the truth. It’s beautiful in negative terms. This conventional ugliness, being neither prejudicial nor compassionate, makes us laugh. The absence of commiseration allows us to administer the correction of the norm and the sanction of excess. Ridiculum acri/Fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res. (Horace, Satire I, 10) (vide supra: chapter 7: Laughter and democracy, concerning the comedy of Aristophanes). If the drunkard who falls down makes us laugh “we laugh without further comparison, if a grand and notable personage, who watches where he walks with serious, starchy steps, banging heavily into a stone, falls suddenly into a mire.” And even more so, or at least with an increased delight, if this individual is an impostor, because: “there is nothing as deformed and which makes us feel less pity than if this same personage is unworthy of the rank that he holds; and of the honour that we accord him; if he is hated by everyone for his pride and excessive revelling, resembling a monkey dressed in scarlet, as the proverb says. (Joubert, op. cit. p. 19)

It is, of course, often necessary to resort to more realistic answers, as we have already noted, but it can also be said that laughter is partly linked with the specific type of energy that allows man to select facts that fit with the laws of his perception and of his society. If knowledge, as a method of deferred action, is also an active ignorance of a determined species, then laughter holds a non negligible part in this programme. And, when we think about it, how can we laugh when know that pretty much everything eludes us, that we are “tinkering in the hopeless” that, in a moment, reality could bring a smarting denial to the evidence that causes us to laugh. A Greek proverb, an irresistible funniness, because it lays down the representation, of laughter and of fear, of pleasure and of pain on the same face (the two extremes of the emotional spectrum, which only have one head, which would not know how to coexist and yet which are homologues, if not consecutive ones: “What a strange thing, my friends, it appears to be what we call pleasure! And what a strange link it naturally has with what happens to be its opposite, pain! They refuse to meet each other together in man, but if we pursue one and manage to catch one, we are nearly always constrained to catch the other as well, as if, in despite of their dual nature, they are in fact attached to the same head” Phedon 60a) states that

“the wise man only laughs whilst trembling”. It is difficult to be both white with fear and scarlet with laughter. Oh yes! How can we laugh? Seriously. This unconsciousness, a denial of what is real – which is tragic – is a challenge to wisdom.

... /...

Rechercher dans : http://www.AnthropologieEnLigne.com