The Politics of Laughter in Eugene O’Neill’s <i>Lazarus Laughed</i>

ABSTRACT Eugene O’Neill’s Lazarus Laughed (1927) is an important incorporation of the Nietzschean philosophy of laughter, essentially as posited in The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spake Zarathustra. Raised from the dead, Lazarus curiously returns as a Zarathustrian Messiah, preaching among the mobs a laughter springing from a Dionysian exultation and an Apollonian seriousness. O’Neill’s conceptualization of laughter, which has an array of implications, remains, however, a somewhat neglected topic. This article proposes to analyze the political underpinnings of the psychology of laughter in this equally understudied play. In the first place, it outlines the ideological, cultural, and historical foundations of O’Neill’s philosophy of laughter, basically derived from Nietzsche. Second, it traces its attendant dynamics of political hierarchy in the drama. The article concludes by showing how the medium of laughter is intertwined with Modernist, essentially solipsistic, theatrical aesthetics, which are equally Nietzschean.