The Laughter of Literature : A diachronic study of the social functions of laughter in British literature

This paper investigates the historical development of the social functions of laughter in literature using linguistic analysis. Many previous studies have analyzed the connection between humor and laughter, but very few have looked at laughter in literature. In this paper, using the eight social functions of laughter defined by Foot and McCreaddie (2007), instances of the word laugh and its variants were analyzed in canonical British literature from the 14th century to the 21st and then compared. In the literature investigated, derision laughter was the most common function during the 15th through 17th centuries. In the centuries to follow humorous laughter took that position. An explanation for this could be that there was no clear division between derision laughter and humorous laughter until the 18th century (Classen, 2010). Also noted was an increase in the frequency of instances of laughter per 1000 words since the 17th century in the investigated literature, as well as an increase in variation of social functions used. The low frequency of laughter in the past may have been a result of the teachings of the church in England. The increased variation in functions of laughter could indicate that the pragmatic feature of laughter has acquired new functions, or that some functions were not depicted in the older literature of this study