Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note to the reader
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Greek laughter in theory and practice
- 2 Inside and outside morality: the laughter of Homeric gods and men
- 3 Sympotic elation and resistance to death
- 4 Ritual laughter and the renewal of life
- 5 Aischrology, shame and Old Comedy
- 6 Greek philosophy and the ethics of ridicule
- 7 Greek laughter and the problem of the absurd
- 8 The intermittencies of laughter in Menander's social world
- 9 Lucian and the laughter of life and death
- 10 Laughter denied, laughter deferred: the antigelastic tendencies of early Christianity
- Appendix 1 The Greek (body) language of laughter and smiles
- Appendix 2 Gelastic faces in visual art
- Bibliography
- Index of selected authors and works
- Index of selected Greek terms
- General index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note to the reader
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Greek laughter in theory and practice
- 2 Inside and outside morality: the laughter of Homeric gods and men
- 3 Sympotic elation and resistance to death
- 4 Ritual laughter and the renewal of life
- 5 Aischrology, shame and Old Comedy
- 6 Greek philosophy and the ethics of ridicule
- 7 Greek laughter and the problem of the absurd
- 8 The intermittencies of laughter in Menander's social world
- 9 Lucian and the laughter of life and death
- 10 Laughter denied, laughter deferred: the antigelastic tendencies of early Christianity
- Appendix 1 The Greek (body) language of laughter and smiles
- Appendix 2 Gelastic faces in visual art
- Bibliography
- Index of selected authors and works
- Index of selected Greek terms
- General index
Summary
In his characteristically bittersweet essay Elogio degli uccelli, ‘A eulogy of birds’, written in 1824, Giacomo Leopardi puts in the mouth of Amelius (a fictionalised version of Plotinus' student of that name) a set of meditations which, among other things, treat the singing of birds as a kind of laughter. This thought gives Amelius the cue for a digression on the nature of laughter itself, which he regards (in a perception so typical of Leopardi, and one which later influenced Nietzsche) as a paradoxical capacity of humans, ‘the most tormented and miserable of creatures’. After pondering a number of laughter's qualities – including its strange connection with an awareness of the vanity of existence, its appearance as a sort of ‘temporary madness’, and its association with inebriation – Amelius gives a startling undertaking: ‘but these matters I will deal with more fully in a history of laughter which I am thinking of producing …’ (‘Ma di queste cose tratterò più distesamente in una storia del riso, che ho in animo di fare …’), a history in which he promises to trace the intricate fortunes of the phenomenon from its ‘birth’ right up to the present.
This passage in Leopardi's wonderful essay is, as far as I am aware, the first place where anyone ever contemplated such a peculiar thing as a ‘history of laughter’.
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- Information
- Greek LaughterA Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity, pp. vii - xPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008