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Culture --- Laughter --- Philosophy --- Europe --- Civilization.

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Digital media --- Laughter --- Social aspects. --- Psychological aspects.

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The crucial question is not whether or not there is offensive laughter but whether or not all laughter offends. Almost everyone has felt the bitter stab of malicious laughter and knows that laughter can be cruel, but it is more difficult to decide if there is also laughter that can never insult. Through a reading of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Molière, Fielding, and Rostand, Victorian nonsense poetry, and the philosophical texts of Plato, Dante, and More, Gantar explores the reasons for critics' prejudice against comedy, the specific position of laughter in various utopian societies, and self-deprecating laughter and the role of the comedian as its primary producer. His conclusions contradict basic postmodern thought and contribute to current debates on the epistemological nature of criticism.

Laughter in literature. --- Laughter --- Laughing --- Emotions --- Nonverbal communication --- Wit and humor --- Moral and ethical aspects.

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En proposant une exploration du rire chez Marguerite Duras, ce volume collectif aborde une facette méconnue et négligée d’une œuvre réputée ardue et sombre. Le rire, examiné dans l’ensemble de la production (entretiens, textes, théâtre, films) et entendu dans un sens générique, est aussi bien celui qui intervient dans l’œuvre, émis par l’auteure ou véhiculé par ses narrateurs et personnages, que celui suscité par l’œuvre chez ses récepteurs. Qu’elles interrogent ses apparitions et évocations explicites ou se penchent sur les ressorts humoristiques et comiques qui le provoquent, les dix-sept contributions réunies ici permettent de constater l’abondance et l’importance du rire dans l’univers durassien et d’en mesurer la diversité, la complexité et l’ambivalence. Manifestation de joie, sursaut de vie, bouffée d’enfance, pied de nez aux codes, aux conventions et à la raison, le rire apparaît aussi comme l’expression de ce « gai désespoir » que Duras a célébré. Les réflexions présentes dans l’ouvrage, tout en cherchant à dépasser des idées reçues et des interprétations figées, ne sonnent donc pas le glas de la dimension tragique de la création durassienne, elles la font résonner autrement.

Laughter. --- Humor in literature. --- Duras, Marguerite --- Criticism and interpretation.

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"While living in anti-Semitic Vienna, Freud wrote in a letter to Ernest Jones, 'What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.' Tragicomic attunement-seeing the comic in the tragic and the tragic in the comic-is a perspective on life that, following Freud, is one of the best ways to 'to ward off possible suffering' and better manage the stressors, anxieties, and worries of everyday life. Moreover, tragicomic attunement and intervention has a meaning-giving, affect-integrating, life-affirming, double structure that is especially pertinent to sensible living in our troubled and troubling post-modern world: 'In tragedy', said theologian Harvey Cox, 'we weep and are purged. In comedy we laugh and hope.' In Monty Python's Life of Brian, a bunch of crucified criminals happily sing 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life'; In Stephen King's book The Tommyknockers, the central character thinks about a joke he heard once. As a man is about to be executed, the firing squad officer in charge offers the man about to be shot a cigarette. He replies, 'No thanks, I'm trying to quit.' It is precisely this capacity to use one's imaginative resources to create a tragicomic 'form of life', a way of thinking, feeling, and acting in the service of aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical deepening, of affirming Beauty, Truth and, especially, Goodness, that mainly constitutes the art of living the 'good life.' In chapters on love, work, suffering, death, and psychoanalysis, the author shows how the 'nuts and bolts' of tragicomic attunement and intervention can be cultivated and used to help people better manage the harshness, if not outrageousness, of life, as well as more deeply engage its beauty and nobility. Unlike most books on the psychology and philosophy of humour, and following Ludwig Wittgenstein's wonderful advice-'A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes,' this book is replete with jokes, humorous stories, and amusing maxims and quotes making it a lively reading experience that aims to help people fashion the 'good life'-a life of deep and expansive love, creative and productive work, that is aesthetically pleasing and in accordance with reason and ethics. As tragicomic master Mel Brooks noted, 'Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you,' and becoming more attuned to its dynamics and applications in everyday life is the art of living the 'good life'."--Provided by publisher.

Laughter --- Laughing --- Emotions --- Nonverbal communication --- Wit and humor --- Therapeutic use.