Laughter and pleasure

Laughter and pleasure are generally presumed to be intimately connected with one another and one recent writer, John Morreall, advances the strong thesis that a pleasant psychological shift is a causally necessary condition for laughter. I counter Morreall's thesis with a panoply of examples. Morreatt's response to some ofthese isfound to be inadequate and confused. An alternative reading of his thesis is attempted and also found wanting, although in the end some interesting possibilities for a certain subdomain of laughter are hinted at. ... I would chuse to say, that Laughter is a Mechanical Motion, which we are naturally thrown into, when we are unaccountably pleas'd. — Bernard Mandeville, 1729. There seems much, then, to be said for the hypothesis that all varieties of joyous laughter (when not reduced to a mechanical form) are excited by something in the nature ofasudden accession of pleasurable consciousness. — James Sully, 1902. LAUGHTER RESULTS FROM A PLEASANT PSYCHOLOGICAL SHIFT. I say "results from" here because laughter is neither the psychological shift itself nor the pleasant feeling produced by the shift. It is rather the physical activity which is caused by, and which expresses the feeling produced by, the shift. — John Morreall, 1982. Humor 7-2 (1994), 157-172. 0933-1719/94/0007-0157 © Walter de Gruyter