Nietzschean Laughter

‘Nietzschean Laughter’ – ARTICLE REVIEW

Author: Pete. A. Gunter

Gunter compares Freud’s, Bergson’s and Nietzsche’s attempts at tackling the question of why we laugh.

Bergson poses that our laughter is exclusively of an ‘un-admirable kind’, borne only from things that are abnormal or beneath our standards of either intellect or class:

We laugh…whenever repetition, incongruity, insensibility seem to pose some slight danger to our society: for example, we laugh at the eccentric whose absentmindedness and failure to adapt must not become general practice.

Freud poses that our laughter is a sudden expression of psychic energy which hints at the contents of the unconscious – a theory more in tune with Nietzsche’s one. It does two things:

(1)[Allow] us to express forbidden feelings and (2) [save] us the effort of repression.

Now, whilst Nietzsche also poses that laughter is an expression of psychic energy, he distinguishes 2 different types of laughter: that of the herd, which you find in ordinary comedy and wit, and the rarely heard ‘higher laughter’ – the expression of fulfilled desire through hardship.

Both Bergson and Freud neglect the latter type of laughter, and focus only on those associated with ‘comedy’ or satire – or, as Gunter so writes:

…forms of laughter which have their source in the inability of the will to achieve its goals, and for the most part has neglected those forms of laughter which express fulfilment.

This makes perfect sense, as normal comedy is mostly a low cost effort – it does not take much for it to stimulate us. Compare this then with the laughter of the man who, through much toil and pains reached his destination with absolute joy – clearly we can see this is the rarer and more valuable form of laughter.

Such a comparison is not meant to shame those that laugh at witty remarks and well made comedy – but through comparison show that it is a laugh of diluted form against the laugh from the exhausted, happy victor.