COMEDY

LAUGHTER 127From this idea, it is not far to ‘superiority theory’, one of the three mostdurable explanations of laughter in Western culture. By far the mostfamous representative of superiority theory is the seventeenth-centuryEnglish philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In truth, Hobbes had little to sayabout laughter, but what he did say is quoted in almost every discussionof the subject, even though his ambiguity towards the topic is clearwhen he calls laughter the signal of a ‘passion that hath no name’(Hobbes, 1840: 45). ‘Laughter’, he wrote in his Human Nature (1650),‘is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conceptionof some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity ofothers, or with our own formerly’ (Hobbes, 1840:46). For Hobbes,laughter is always antagonistic and conflictual, establishing a hierarchyat the moment of pleasure. In Leviathan (1660), he makes his ethicalobjection to this clear when he states that ‘much laughter at the defectsof others is a sign of Pusillanimity’ (Hobbes, 1991:43). Even laughterthat is not immediately directed at an ‘inferior’ person actually presentis structured according to this principle: ‘Laughter without offense,must be at absurdities and infirmities abstracted from persons, and whenall the company may laugh together’ (Hobbes, 1840:46–47). Clearly,there are types of humour that depend on a feeling of superiority fortheir operation. Racist and sexist jokes, for example, presume an ethnic,gendered, and intellectual advantage on the part of the teller and hisaudience. Yet it is also possible to see that much laughter does not arisefrom a feeling of pre-eminence, even one that is suppressed or inverted.Like the early Christian commentators, Hobbes’s definition belongs tothe tradition that understands laughter operating within a moralframework that sees laughers as selfregarding and uncharitable.Superiority theory even became an edict of manners in eighteenthcentury‘men of quality’ who refused to laugh on grounds of breeding.In one of his comprehensive letters, Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773)warns his son that he should be,never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter isthe characteristic of folly and ill manners…. In my mind nothingso illiberal, and so ill-bred as audible laughter…how low andunbecoming a thing laughter is. Not to mention the disagreeablenoise it makes, and the shocking distortion of the face itoccasions.(Stanhope, 1929:49)