Laughter is a funny thing –but what is it? Is it speech? Is it non-speech, like the thump of a stone in the grass? Is it something “in-between” –a part of that company of things which includes the bark of dogs, the purr of cats, the whisper of tree branches, the caw of birds?
What does it mean to laugh?
We can describe the event medically: an enlargement of the face, a delighted drawing at the corners of the eyes, a rhythmic undulation of the thorax producing the peculiar sounds in the voice.
We can describe the objects of laughter: a joke, a humorous situation, an awkwardness, a delightful gift, a comedic resolution in a narrative (e.g. the end of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
We can event elucidate theories of the comedic: how to produce the effect in audiences, how to write good jokes, differences between dark comedy and slapstick, etc.
Everyone seems capable of it, so it cannot be identified strictly with an emotion or station in life: villains laugh and heroines laugh; bursars laugh and beggars laugh; the infant and the president both laugh.
But what does it mean to laugh? What is it?
Georges Bataille suggested that laughter is, at it’s core, the collapse of the knowable. We laugh, according to Bataille, not merely when we don’t know something but when all of the illusions about what we know are shown as false. “We laugh, in short, in passing very abruptly, all of a sudden, from a world in which everything is firmly qualified, in which everything is given as stable within a generally stable order, into a world in which our assurance is overwhelmed,” (1986, 90).
Does this satisfy us? It seems pretty close but fails ultimately because it does not account for Yahweh’s laughter. Bataille’s commitments to mystical atheism leave his account of laughter somewhat empty –like the sound of a hollow chuckle—for God laughs (Ps. 2:4; Zeph. 3:17).
And if God laughs, laughter must be something more than the sheer unknowability of the unknown. The omniscient One laughs, so laughter cannot be mere vacuity.
What is it then?
Laughter is confession.
Often it is involuntary. It is what we do when reality arrives and lays a demand on us. By it the condition of our hearts are laid bare. By it we are pressed into solidarity with the jest, or are condemned with the scoffers. Laughter can also be the decisive act of concurrence, we can choose to confess our joy or our non-comprehension or our surprise.
Laughter as a confession convicts us: we become one who “finds this funny.”
Like a confession laughter can deepen and return. I can confess the same things over again with a deeper honesty, and can laugh at the same The Office episode as each watching enriches it.
Like confession I can fake a laugh and remain dead in my heart.
Like confession it can be a glad thing to expose myself in this way or it can be a shameful thing.
When confronted with reality, inane laughter can be a confession that we do not know the truth or dare not speak its name.
Bataille was right in at least one way: laughter, as confession, always implies a failure of some sort: Courageous laughter confesses the failure of sin and evil. A glad laugh confesses the failure of the things opposed to goodness. A wicked laugh is a laugh that confesses a failure to love what is good. A jolly laugh, one of the most subversive of all good things, confesses the failure of our strength to save ourselves, and thus this category of laughter (the slapstick the bodily noises the pun the dad-joke the knock-knock and the riddle) serve to make us wise by helping not put our trust in the strength of horses and chariot (Ps. 20:7).