Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema

In a time when the movie theater—and cinema in general—is in a state of existential crisis, the communal experience of watching movies together captures what could be lost if the practice of watching movies in a theater is not preserved. Think pieces in newspapers and industry journals as well as memes emphasize the benefits of people sharing the theater space together (as exemplified by Nicole Kidman’s AMC Theaters’ speech and the #Gentleminions craze) not just to watch a movie but to have a moment. However, not all experiences and all people associated with the moviegoing experience or communal entertainment at large have been acceptable. In fact, the history of mirth and enjoyment has often been policed due to fears about female agency and racial equality and concerns over how much our unconscious may control us. In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema, Maggie Hennefeld examines various narratives connected with the idea of death due to excessive laughter in relation to psychological theories, the early days of cinema, and the struggle over women’s autonomy in the world.Death by Laughter has an introduction, three parts each containing three chapters, and a conclusion. Hennefeld introduces the notion that laughter can kill by detailing a brief history of people dying from laughing too hard or too long and then connecting these phenomena to formative cinematic representations of hysteria. She begins by examining how hysterical laughter went from being seen as a negative emotional sensation that was meant to be repressed to being celebrated when it was part of a collective activity. This examination grounds Hennefeld’s compelling account of fatal joy, elucidated by her analysis of dozens of anecdotes about women dying from deriving too much mirth from a poor joke or from a husband’s foolishness: “‘Was it some newly imported variation of the veteran mother-in-law jest?’ asked the Boston Herald in its mocking eulogy for . . . a woman who sacrificed herself on the altar of her husband’s unspecified witticism” (51). From here she works out how female bodies positioned as “hysterical” or prefigured as different became objects of amusement, even as the laughter associated with their bodies was linked with the sort of mass hysteria that can blur lines between conscious and unconscious actions. Ultimately, Hennefeld argues that early cinema was foundational to the cultural production of anxieties about women having too much fun, whether as spectators watching films on the big screen or as figures represented on it. These women were like strange Medusas who were able to cross boundaries between the screen and the real world.Hennefeld draws interesting connections between humor studies and other academic fields that showcase relevant insights from distinct historical periods. Hysteria, for example, is embraced as a powerful tool by contemporary feminists. Hennefeld thus emphasizes the anecdotal, discarded, and marginalized parts of history in a shrewd way, particularly in her take on how hysteria and laughter in film mix with psychological judgments and the rise of a modern capitalism that workers required a release from. Hennefeld also does a good job of bringing in disability studies as she interrogates the ways debility and so-called ill humor get pathologized by the medical community and folded into ethics surrounding the production and consumption of popular entertainment: “As we know, Charcot modeled his lectures on the circus, fancying himself as something of a lay ringmaster. . . . It is no surprise that many of his former patients found gainful employment as carnival somnambulists and trance walkers after escaping the clinic” (129–30). To make fun of or with female hysterics is to engender comedy through physical and mental differences.While Hennefeld’s inclusion of so many different ideas is fruitful, it can also result in information overload that distracts from the more interesting moments in the book. Cutting the fat from the first two sections of the book and having fewer chapters would have made the setup for the crucial section on early cinema stronger. The three parts of the book also feel disjointed from each other. Hennefeld makes sure that the major ideas of each section link with one another and remain part of her broader project, yet they still feel relegated to their individual section to the point that the principal concept of death by laughter sort of disappears about halfway through the book only to reappear in an all-too-brief conclusion. Similarly, the mentions of racism and racial violence that are woven throughout the book seem a bit too disparate to fully comingle with the main ideas drawn from disability and madness studies. Hennefeld’s book provides an important guide for future scholars, though, since it reveals just how much joy can endanger us, not to mention the status quo, and the importance of a shared sense of humor in, at, or about the movies.