Laughter as Gesture: Hilarity and the Anti-Sublime

Summary

Why should laughter not possess “meaning”just like other forms of human articulation? It does use the same organs as speech: face, mouth, voice, diaphragm, breath, and so on. Yet the enigma and exasperation of laughter arise from the impossibility of parsing risible meaning. In short, laughter disturbs precisely by its ambiguity, its ability to send a meaningless message. It raises the issue of cognition but then veers off into (non-rational) bodily expression: in short laughter-as-gesture. If Kant first noted this dynamic, it was Schopenhauer, following Jean Paul, who reflected most deeply on it. Max Kommerell's groundbreaking book on Jean Paul (1933), recognizing the originality of these thinkers, conceptualized Gebärde“gesture”as a means of expressing the ego through the body without recourse to language (Ichgefühl). Laughter is one of the most complex manifestations of Ichgefühl. This insight extends key aspects of insights Nietzsche formulated in Also sprach Zarathustra.All of these meditations postulate variations on the bodily grotesque as a non-conceptual meeting of corporeal being with an unmasked and chaotic world.