Stability of Laughter

<p>A sad and corrupt age a period of crisis and upheaval—what T.S. Eliot famously summed up as the panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. Modernism has always been characterized by its self-conscious sense of suffering. Why then was it so obsessed with laughter? From Baudelaire Nietzsche Bergson and Freud to Pirandello Beckett Hughes Barnes and Joyce no moment in cultural history has written about laughter this much. James Nikopoulos investigates modernity’s paradoxical relationship with mirth. Why was the gesture we conventionally associate with happiness deemed the only sensible way of responding to a world as Max Weber wrote that had been disenchanted of its gods? In answering these questions Nikopoulos also delves into our ongoing relationship with laughter. He looks to contemporary research in emotion and evolutionary theory as well as to the two-thousand-plus-year history of the philosophy of humor in order to propose a novel way of understanding laughter humor and their complicated relationships with modern life. <i>The Stability of Laughter</i> explores how art unsettles the simplifications we revert to in our attempts to make sense of human history and social interaction.</p>