The Pleasure of Fools: Essays in the Ethics of Laughter.

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

In seven well-reasoned philosophical essays and with an introduction and a conclusion, Jure Gantar, an associate professor and the chair of the Theatre Department at Dalhousie University, endeavours to answer the ethical question of “whether or not all laughter offends.” Endnotes, an extensive bibliography and an index are also included.

To answer his thematic question he surveys and analyzes “a variety of possibilities for a perfectly ethical laughter.” Aiming his discourse at academics and theoreticians, he begins by outlining alternatives to laughter before examining several typologies of laughter with references to such luminaries as Jonathan Swift, Rabelais, Aristophanes, Socrates, George Meredith, and Charlie Chaplin, among others, to illustrate his arguments. He then dissects the traditions of nonsense in its ethical and non-ethical contexts, again referencing icons of literature and drama, and using citations from their works to substantiate his points of view. In his fourth chapter, Professor Gantar turns his attention to the concept of “ridicule” and examples of its use throughout the ages. Next, he discusses how laughter has been used by the likes of Dante, Plato, and Socrates in the depiction of their utopias compared to the controlled use of laughter in Soviet utopian depictions. The self-deprecating laughter of writers such as Gogol with his “laughter born of love for man” and of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac are the next to be examined in the search for an ethical laughter, followed by the chapter, “The Comedian,” with its central focus on the work of the French dramatist, Molière, who Gantar finds to be the past master of all authors at exploiting self-deprecating laughter.

A comparison of laughter and insult concludes the study and ends with the author’s admonition, “When we laugh, we should not care about offending. And when we investigate laughter critically, we should forget about ethics.” And as readers perhaps we might also recall that, “he who laughs last ….”