Laughter, long considered instinctive, has a history. It took off in the democratic era, when societies became industrialized and globalized. The representations relayed by new media then formed a culture that reflected the paradoxes of our modernity.
In the middle of the XIXe century, a now almost forgotten French novelist, Paul de Kock, made tens of thousands of readers laugh around the world. His novels were read in Paris and the provinces, translated and exported from Brazil and the United States to Russia, via Germany and England. And people laughed at the misadventures and ridiculousness of terribly Parisian characters, honorable bourgeois from the Marais, “lorettes” from the rue des Martyrs, young people from the wealthy neighborhoods or pretty grisettes. Paul de Kock’s scenes, wrote a critic of the time, force you “too often, in spite of yourself, to move your lips, to laugh, to burst out, to roll around in frenetic transports, depending on whether you live on the first, second, third or fourth floor.” Physiology and sociology of laughter: laughter engages the body, but not all bodies engage, should engage equally in laughter. Here, the laughter would be all the more frank as one descends the social ladder, going up the floors of a Parisian building of the XIXe century, at a time when the center of Paris was still popular, and when social differentiation was played out along the banisters. Historicity of laughter, too: today, we no longer read Paul de Kock. Not that he no longer makes us laugh, if we did read him: there are enough comic elements – somersaults, misunderstandings and quips – or even characters with quirks, to smile, or even laugh for real. But, finally, we would say, this laughter is “dated.”
Alain Vaillant addresses in The Civilization of Laughter all the facets of laughter: this is therefore not a book about comedy, about the processes that make us laugh, but rather about laughter itself, this characteristic of man that questions anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, but also philosophy, linguistics, history, sociology and literary studies. Alain Vaillant has cast a wide net and leads his reader on a vast exploration of the territories of laughter, from the physiology of laughter to its most contemporary cultural variations, from literature to cinema, including theatre, television and comics. “Civilisation” is therefore understood in its broadest sense, “as the process of evolution of human societies and as the set of cultural forms through which it is expressed” (p. 126). Barbaric, regressive, aggressive, disturbing, transgressive, dreamlike, liberating, how can we understand this phenomenon that grabs you in the gut, sometimes irrepressibly, when faced with an incongruous situation or when listening to a good joke?
Freud versus Bergson
Alain Vaillant opens the library of theories of laughter to us and makes his choices: it will be Freud, rather than Bergson, whose essay Laughter (1899) is based “on a conception of laughter that is false in principle” (p. 49). Two elements of Bergson’s analysis seem particularly erroneous: the famous formula, about the comic ‒ “the mechanical plastered on the living” ‒ and the idea that the comic concerns “pure” intelligence and requires “something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart”. Anesthesia of the heart? But laughter is emotional, sometimes empathetic. Mechanics of the comic? Bergson aims much more at the corporeality, the materiality of the living, than at social mechanics. Besides, notes Alain Vaillant, what do we laugh at in Modern Times Chaplin’s? Not of the assembly line but of its disruption and the confusion that follows.
Better than Laughter by Bergson, it is Freud’s essay The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905) which provides good keys to analysis – we note in passing, with Alain Vaillant, how much, at the turn of the XIXe And XXe centuries, laughter was the object of all the attention of the sciences of the psyche, at the very moment when boulevard theater triumphed. From Freud’s analysis, Alain Vaillant retains the liberating function of the repressed forces of the unconscious and more broadly the decompression, the release, the defusing permitted by laughter. It is the laughter of the child who plays with the language, delirium, frees himself from prohibitions. Alain Vaillant also devotes luminous pages to children’s literature, and in particular to the albums of Claude Ponti, tireless inventor of children’s words, or rather words for children (the evil Grabamor Crabamor, the joyful pastry splash in mountains of flour, etc.).
A plural laugh
It is therefore first a question of identifying principles: the first concerns the relationship between laughter and the situation of danger. We are constantly flirting with fear: laughter comes when we manage to regard what threatens us as a spectacle without danger.
Laughter comes because I represent the world to myself and I become aware of this representation of the world made by my gaze. (p. 34)
Here we find the defusing function already mentioned. Alain Vaillant then distinguishes the representation dimension of laughter (which we find in the theater) and that of communication: laughter involves partners (even virtual ones), it spreads, and amplifies in this propagation (this is the function of laughter recorded in comedy shows); this is where it can also become aggressive, stigmatizing, hostile.
The book then navigates between the different dimensions of laughter, exposing with great pedagogical clarity its mechanisms (incongruity, amplification or expansion – where we find the good old comedy of situation and repetition) and its facets: communal and aggressive laughter on the one hand, laughter of connivance, laughter of the mystifier, deadpan humor, irony, marvelous laughter, dreamlike laughter, laughter of nonsense (in Lewis Carroll), laughter of genius and of the artist (Baudelaire, who was also the theoretician On the essence of laughter in 1855; Hugo in The Man Who Laughs). The literature specialist of the XIXe century that is Alain Vaillant gives us here his most enlightening pages: by revealing Baudelaire’s passion for laughter, the “absolute comedy (…) (which) frees the imagination, makes the mind accessible, with an extraordinary intensity, to all sensitive emotions” (p. 71); by returning to the sense of the grotesque and fantasy in Victor Hugo; by dwelling on “the sadly jubilant irony” of Flaubert, when “everything that appears most serious in normal life”, sincere feelings or commitments in the first place, is judged from the point of view of “the superior joke” (p. 178).
From the principles, we thus come to a cultural and literary history of laughter, to which Alain Vaillant had already devoted numerous works, which are here synthesized and systematized. From Rabelais to contemporary humorists, passing through the laughter police in XVIIe century, political satire, comics and contemporary art, Alain Vaillant covers a wide range, perhaps too wide to not sometimes lose analytical intensity. His most convincing pages concern again this culture of laughter in which his favorite authors have bathed, the laughter of the big city of the XIXe century, where everything becomes a spectacle, where we have fun with everything and nothing.
A liberating function?
This smiling irony, this light and mocking spirit of joke, known throughout the world as the marks of a certain “French spirit”, Alain Vaillant also suggests its dark side: a certain inability to commit, a sterile contempt for the other. Laughter has its politics, which are not all on the side of emancipation. The last chapter thus explores the territories and limits of “democratic laughter”, when satire is no longer a weapon of war against the authorities. It is irony and humor, then, which take over, ‒ this humor so difficult to define (by definition …), made of extravagance and phlegm, lucidity and emotion, distance and unreason. Community humor, which laughs with and laughs against, which plays with stigmatization, ‒ when it does not produce it: again a question of limits.
With democratic laughter, we touch on cultural industries and the globalization of a certain “American laughter,” empathetic and playful. And the press specialist that Alain Vaillant is also ends his journey by analyzing the media springs of contemporary laughter, whose “matrix form… is parody” (p. 307). We return to the initial intuitions of the book, because parody transforms all reality, even the most disturbing or the least desirable, into a spectacle, while valorizing the media itself, which often becomes its own target, what Alain Vaillant calls self-parodization. In the last pages of this very learned work, we sense a hint of regret: the loss of these cultures of laughter – some so subtle, others so wonderfully poetic – in the face of the globalization and industrialization of laughter, which would lead to both a simplification and a standardization of comic procedures. But this regret is also a political position: this globalized laughter is the laughter of our liberal world, where everything is spectacularized in media representation, where humor serves to defuse conflicts (“laughter is the lubricant of social interaction and regulated freedom,” p. 319) and therefore to control collective emotions. Alain Vaillant ends up pointing out “totalitarianism soft of laughter, very insidious” (p. 320), and devoid of any real critical charge. And it is here that this journey conducted at full speed at all levels and in all eras of laughter, asserts itself as a political gesture: “to give back to laughter its true anthropological mission, which is to put reality at a distance. But to see it better.” (p. 320)