Risible

Book excerpt: "Risible offers an alternative re-telling of the intellectual, technological, and sonic history of laughter, a phenomenon that cannot be accounted for through its causes (such as theories of comedy). Instead, Delia Casadei argues, laughter is a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. The long-forgotten history of laughter--which reaches back to ancient Greece--re-emerges with explosive force in the late nineteenth century thanks to the binding of laughter to sound-reproduction technology. This alternative genealogy of laughter as human technique and sound technology is thrown into stark relief by the tension between the ownership and reproduction of the black voice in phonograph records, in metaphors of contagion and laughter in the early global market of phonographic laughing songs, and in the strange commodity of pre-recorded laughtracks. As such, laughter becomes a means of working out the very category of sound (not-quite-human, unintelligible, reproductive and reproducible, contagious) across the twentieth century"--