The Morality of Laughter Book

One of the strongest cultural signals about how to live comes from laughter, whose sting we can never ignore. We can manage poverty, illness, even shame, but not ridicule, and the strategies we employ to immunize ourselves against it constitute a thick code of conduct the author calls "the morality of laughter." Drawing on French and classical literature as well as Aristotle and Nietzsche, the author weaves his way through a thicket of nuanced examples and counterexamples to support his main theory, that superiority--the joker's signal of power over the butt of the joke--is a necessary condition for laughter, "a key that unlocks every door." Thus, Buckley suggests, laughter teaches us what society values and what it shuns. By identifying virtues, laughter identifies vices as well. He concludes by asserting that "Laughter invites us to think of life as a fine art," and examines the possibility of a "unified field" of thinking about laughter. F. H. Buckley is Professor of Law, the George Mason University School of Law. Read More