COMEDY

LAUGHTER 125three detailed stories about the laughter-provoking actions of monkeysat the bedside of the dangerously ill, he concludes that ‘the dignity andexcellence of laughter is…very great inasmuch as it reinforces the spiritso much that it can suddenly change the state of the patient, and fromhis deathbed render him curable’ (Joubert, 1980:128).Bakhtin, apparently inspired by the restorative function attributed tolaughter by early modern science, extends its implications into thepolitical arena by crediting it with the ability to triumph over oppression:‘festive folk laughter presents an element of victory not only oversupernatural awe, of the sacred over death; it also means the defeat ofpower, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all thatoppresses and restricts’ (Bakhtin, 1984:92). Largely silenced by anofficial culture that consolidates its power through seriousness,Bakhtin’s laughter is the popular voice of the people, not onlyalleviating the tensions of official ideology, but cutting right throughthem and denying their influence. As we shall see shortly, thisconception of laughter as an extra-linguistic challenge to systems oforder is a notion that enjoys some popularity in twentieth-centurycriticism.SUPERIORITY AND INCONGRUITY THEORIESThe superiority theory of laughter states that human beings are movedto laugh when presented with a person or situation they feelthemselves to be intellectually, morally, or physically above. Bakhtin’sargument claims that by the sixteenth century a reorganization ofintellectual categories under the auspices of humanism continued toseparate laughter from official culture. This led to a starker demarcationof the serious and the comic where ‘that which is important and essentialcannot be comical’, and ‘the essential truth about the world and mancannot be told in the language of laughter’ (Bakhtin, 1984:67). Laughterwas removed from its position in philosophy and turned into scorn,becoming ‘a light amusement or a form of salutary social punishment ofcorrupt and low persons’ (Bakhtin, 1984:67). We can certainly see thatthe concept of laughter changes in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, in a way that imbues it with an ethical significance. Sir PhilipSidney, for example, remarked that laughter ‘hath only a scornfultickling’ (Sidney, 1991:68). This attitude is developed further in studiesof rhetoric in the period. Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetoricke(1567) provides a perfect example of the humanist conception oflaughter. ‘The occasion of laughter’, he writes,