Just for Laughs. An Introduction to the Many, Multi-faceted Interactions between Architecture and Humour

In the first book we dealt with tragedy.(...) now we will deal with comedy... and see how, in inspiring the pleasure of the ridiculous, it arrives at the purification of that passion... inasmuch as -alone among the animals-man is capable of laughter 1 ".Thus began Aristotle's fictional second volume of his Poetics in a passage from The Name of the Rose (1980) with which Umberto Eco erased an entire Platonic-Aristotelian tradition in which humour was reviled.Why -asked William of Baskerville-a book devoted to such an apparently minor subject had spawned so much destruction?The volume's custodian, the blind Jorge de Burgos -an anagram of Jorge Luis Borges-replied that laughter is a diabolical invention, capable of annihilating fear, and, it follows, make powers-that-be tremble.Humour, irony, satire, all allies of laughter, have historically provided the last resort for criticism: in times of repression, obviously, but also today, where the legal figure of the animus iocandi protects the purveyor of scorn -provided his intention is humorous.The joker, when acting in the context of the joke, can reach places forbidden to serious criticism.Of course, the reality outside Eco's novel diverged greatly in its regard of both humour and laughter: the whole Greco-Roman heritage considered them a "malevolent behaviour stemming from hurtful aggression, envy, or spite 2 ".Cicero and Quintilian agreed with Aristotle that "laughter has its basis in some kind of shabbiness or deformity", thus being "degrading to morals, art and religion a form of behaviour from which civilized man should shrink 3 ", and this line of thinking was joined, many centuries later, by Thomas Hobbes, who saw them as invariably originating in the derision of others and the self-aggrandizing of oneself 4 .Even as late as the mid-19 th century, Charles Baudelaire warned against the devilish nature of what he described as 'Satanic Laughter' 5 : "Le Sage ne rit qu'en tremblant ['The Wise Man only laughs while trembling']" 6 , he would famously state."Le rire," -he concluded-"est signe d'infriorit relativement aux sages, qui par l'innocence contemplative de leur esprit se rapprochent de l'enfance 7 ".Laughter, in the minds and writings of the greatest thinkers, was stupid, ignorant, derisive, sarcastic, caustic, ironic, sardonic, malevolent, manic, or even sad.Invariably a result and an indicator of mankind's despise of the weak, of narcissism, ignorance, vulgarity, and inherent weakness, it was an individually corrupting and socially disruptive force.The case for humour, however, would still be made by some, such as Ben Jonson, who defended, shielded by satire, that, by analogy with Aristotle's statement that the purpose of tragedy is the purging of pity and fear, "the purpose of comedy was to purge mankind of foibles and weaknesses", thus, humour worked, instead, "as a social corrective, in its use as criticism of the follies of mankind 8 ".This social purpose would be one of the foundations of a work that would become a main agent in the modern rehabilitation of humour -rather than laughter, as its title claims-: Henri Bergson's Le Rire.Essai sur la signification du comique.In it, Bergson posited that laughter / humour contributed to social wellness in several ways.On the one hand, it worked as a tool to identify those who deviate from the norm by pointing out their vices and faults, therefore working as a device for "an automatic regulation of society 9 ".On the other, it appears as a societal soothing device that smooths things over and brings people together, because, albeit individually exerted, laughter is for Bergson -as for Hobbes-a fundamentally social activity of