La maladie, le rire, le risible

Illness, laughter and risibility. This article attempts to place the 18th Century's rehabilitation of the healthy function of laughter in the Hippocratic medical tradition. Laughter therapy, like other "moral" therapies by music, balls, voyages or the open air, is applied to illnesses of the nerves (vapours, spleen, hypochondria etc). The laughter advised by doctors, which was derived from an intuition of the disease, was opposed to another type of laughter, based on the negation of the illness itself and provoked in the theatre by the presence on stage of more or less imaginary sufferers who themselves constitute the risible subject of the play. Medicine and comic theatre, enlightenment and society, thus take opposing positions concerning this subject (illness) and its instrument (laughter) and come to very different conclusions : on the one hand, an openness towards the complex relationship between the physical and the moral and on the other, the continuation of fears and prejudices.Imbroscio Carmelina. La maladie, le rire, le risible. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°32, 2000. Le rire, sous la direction de Lise Andries . pp. 241-254