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Research theme 2018-19: Laughter

Led Dr Alice Rudge and Dr Andrew Dean.

Laughter

This theme was open to the widest possible interpretation to address the concerns of many disciplines and departments while providing a frame for thinking across or even bypassing entrenched or established modes of thinking. It could include the following concerns:

  • External expressions of merriment/amusement: its corporeal/cognitive dimensions
  • The politics of laughter: irreverence, mockery, ridicule, revenge, revolutionary mirth/glee
  • The aesthetics/poetics of laughter: satire, wit, comic forms, caricature and comedic creations
  • The performance/production of laughter: stand up, clowning, mimicry, jokers and fools
  • Technologies of laughter: canned, recorded, packaged, produced, pre-planned
  • Laughter on line: happy emojis, lol, hahaha, mediations and manipulations of laughing in social networks and new media
  • Laughter and feeling: reparation, catharsis, release, empathy
  • Dark laughter: last laughs, gallows humour, hysteria, contagion, forced funniness, humiliation, hyperbolic horror
  • Weaponised laughter: cruel jokes, taking the piss, winding some-one up, bullies and buffoons
  • Defensive laughter: anxiety, embarrassment, fear, unease
  • Representation/narration of laughter: infectious, unfunny, unpleasant, inappropriate, palliative
  • The laughing body: incontinence, unruliness, excess, falling about, unravelling, porous, seeping

Image: The Laughing Audience (or A Pleased Audience), by William Hogarth (died 1764)

Listen to the Laughter Sound Archive on Soundcloud.

Read or download the Think Pieces Issue on Laughter here. 

Editor-in-Chief: Nicola Miller
Academic Editors: Timothy Carroll & Jane Gilbert
Managing Editor & Graphic Designer: Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
Guest Editors: Andrew Dean & Alice Rudge

The following events were organised by the research group:

Why So Serious? Laughter and Literary Studies (22 January 2019)

With Patrick Hayes (Oxford), Huw Marsh (Quenn Mary University London) and Katie Fleming (Queen Mary University London) and respondent Julia Jordan (UCL). 

Laughter as a Political Tool - Zunar in Malaysia (17 January 2019)

A talk with political cartoonist Zunar addressing the question, how laughter can be used as a tool to challenge existing political structures? 

Laughter as a Political Tool - Zunar in Malaysia (14 January 2019)

An exhibition showing cartoonist Zunar's work. He is an important figure in Malaysian political life who has spoken out on corruption, LGBT rights, Indigenous rights, and colonialism, all through his peaceful use of art in the form of humorous cartoons. 

Kuryokhin’s Stiob: Postmodernist Laughter in the Postcommunist Dark (11 December 2018)

A panel discussion. 

Is it a Laughing Matter? Curating the Funny Side (28 November 2018)

Margot Heller (South London Gallery) and Sarah McCrory (Goldsmiths CCA) were in conversation with Beatrix Gassman De Sousa (The Agency Gallery), Gary Stevens (Slade, UCL) and Marko Ilic (UCL SSEES and Courtauld). 

Laughter in a Post-ironic Turn - Sincerity and Humour in Contemporary Expressions of Irony (14 November 2018)

A panel discussion on contemporary uses of irony and/or postirony through different modes of expression, and the roles that humour and the embodied. With Larne Abse Gogarty (UCL), Shumi Bose, Seth Graham, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, and Florian Mussgnug (UCL).