the current debate about statespersonship and laughter
You might say that laughter has gotten us into this mess. Well, I am saying it, and I, though hypergelastically inclined (meaning laughter-prone) in my youth, am not laughing much at and about this present moment in time. By “mess”—an understatement, surely—I mean the state of global politics, and the state of our political discourse in particular.
Could laughter—supposedly the best medicine—also get us out of this mess? Might it be a symptom of our ailment as well as its cure? Not, I venture, if we carry on trying to laugh it all off. In the act of trivializing matters in hopes of dematerializing danger by declaring it risible, we run the risk of nixing democracy—a system predicated on the willingness to listen—altogether, throwing it away with a hearty tossing back of our heads in a communal display of hilarity. A ditch, after all, is not called a ha-ha for nothing.
Continue reading “Kamala’s Laugh: Risibility, Homo Ridens, and the Hope of “Good Riddance””
Harry Heuser 