Pathological Laughter and the Response to Ridicule: Samuel Richardson, Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding

This article examines a sample of mid-century works by Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, and Jane Collier, to uncover the ways in which their work participates in the debate around the morality of laughter. Rather than simply rejecting comedy and substituting the sighs of sensibility for unselfconscious wit, these writers display vested interests in the meaning of laughter, its renovation and regulation. As a seemingly natural and involuntary response, both physiological and cognitive, laughter parallels and complicates sensibility’s claims to embodied morality. I suggest that even in non-humorous fiction, and perhaps especially in such serious fiction, the epistemology of laughter is of paramount importance. Rather than modeling a permanently lachrymal sensibility, these sentimental authors at times aimed “to laugh [readers] out of their absurdities,” despite fundamental unease about the moral status of laughter