In the Event of Laughter

Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as its pre-history and afterlives <i>In the Event of Laughter</i> argues for a new framework for discussing laughter. Responding to a tradition of 'comedy studies' that has been interested only in the causes of laughter (in <i>why</i>we laugh) it proposes a different relationship between laughter and causality. Ultimately it argues that laughter is both cause and effect troubling chronological time and asking for a more nuanced way of conceiving the relationship between subjects and their laughter than existing theories have accounted for. <br/><br/>Making this visible via psychoanalytic ideas of retroactivity Alfie Bown explores how laughter - far from being a mere response to a stimulus - changes the relationship between the present the past and the future. Bown investigates this hypothesis in relation to a range of comic texts from the 'history of laughter ' discussing Chaucer Shakespeare Kafka and Chaplin as well as lesser-known but vital figures from the comic genre.