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The questions of why we laugh, what causes laughter, and what laughter is have been asked many times, by a great many people. Laughter is an enigma worth attention: it has certain clear coordinates as to where it should appear, yet it erupts from the body seemingly of its own accord; its meaning is always obvious, and yet also just on the edge of the effable. Alfie Brown's In the Event of Laughter takes as its starting point the ambiguities inherent in the act of laughter. The book appreciates laughter as something which is both ‘paradoxically worrying and pleasurable’ (p. 1), and sets out to understand the close relationships laughter has with anxiety, and with political liberation and control. Laughter, the book argues, is an act that warps reality into a meaningful shape bestowed upon it retroactively, with the inverted temporality Freud found to operate in the unconscious. This quality of laughter leads to the book's central argument that, because it manifests a radical break which shapes reality after the fact, laughter is an ‘event’ in the sense developed by Alain Badiou.
To build up this picture of laughter as a Badiouan event, the book reassesses a diverse history of attempts to understand laughter. Thomas Hobbes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Lipvetsky and Milan Kundera are just a few from this expansive list of its interlocutors. At the book's heart, though, are Hegel, Lacan and Badiou - possibly, despite its title, the former two more than the latter - out of whose work Brown develops an understanding of the ‘event’ fine-tuned slightly to account for laughter. To lay out the political significance of this recategorization, the book begins with two chapters which illustrate the political ambiguity of laughter and its seemingly paradoxical ability simultaneously to reinforce and suspend existing hierarchies. The first chapter challenges theories of laughter of the kind usually attributed to Freud or Bakhtin, which present it as the liberation of bound or repressed