COMEDY

LAUGHTER 133taboo subjects. By touching on these difficult topics, the joke doesimportant work, as it alleviates the inhibition of the joker and addressesthe taboo while also keeping it in place. Laughing is the audible signalthat the energy required for ‘cathexis’, the accumulation of energyaround an idea, has been lifted and can now be dispersed in apleasurable fashion. The joker, says Freud,has saved his psychological expenditure…. We should say thathis pleasure corresponds to this economy. Our insight into themechanism of laughter leads us rather to the introduction of theproscribed idea by means of an auditory perception, the cathecticenergy used for the inhibition has now suddenly becomesuperfluous and has been lifted, and is therefore now ready to bedischarged by laughter.(Freud, 2001:148–149)Laughter, then, is the bang of anti-social thoughts colliding with acensorious brick wall: ‘in laughter’, writes Freud, ‘the conditions arepresent under which a sum of psychical energy which has hitherto beenused for cathexis is allowed discharge’ (Freud, 2001:148). LikeSpencer, Freud’s concept of laughter fits into an internal economy, afunctional system that retains the equilibrium of the subject bydisposing of waste in a socially acceptable way, and so maintainingmental health.POSTSTRUCTURALIST LAUGHTERSMilan Kundera’s novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980),contains a scene in which two students, wearing cardboard horns, andtheir teacher begin to giggle uncontrollably during a class discussion ofEugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros :The three women danced and laughed, the cardboard nosesjuggled, and the class looked at them in mute horror. But by nowthe three dancing women were unaware of the others, they wereconcentrating entirely on themselves and on their sensual pleasure.Suddenly Madame Raphael stamped her foot harder and rose afew centimetres above the floor and then, with the next step, wasno longer touching the ground. She pulled her two companionsafter her, and in a moment all three were revolving above thefloor and rising slowly in a spiral. When their hair touched the