Note 23 to Chapter 1 of the author's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter which Clarendon Press published in 1972. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author and of the Clarendon Press, which retains copyright.
There are, of course, earlier theorists who suggest the darkness of laughter or its incompatibility with strong feeling -- there is a hint of this in Aristotle's cryptic remarks -- but Hobbes's formulation seems to have had the most influence on later discussions. He argues that "laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly" (Hobbes, p. 46). Among those later Hobbesian positions, the following are most notable: Charles Baudelaire; Edmund Bergler; Henri Bergson's "Laughter"; Freud's Wit; Anthony M. Ludovici; and Albert Rapp. The Hobbesian argument is best suggested and perhaps most concisely illustrated by Prince Hal's comment in 1 Henry IV: "Falstaff sweats to death and lards the lean earth as he walks along. Were't not for laughing, I should pity him" (II, ii).
Last modified: 1 May 2001