"Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly"
About this Quote
Hobbes defines laughter as a quick surge of self-exaltation: a flash of feeling taller that arrives when a comparison suddenly favors us. The key terms do the work. Sudden points to the jolt of recognition that precedes the grin. Glory names a momentary elevation of status felt from within. Eminency and infirmity frame the comparison, whether we measure ourselves against another person’s stumble or our own earlier ignorance and now feel superior to it.
Set in the mechanistic psychology of Leviathan (1651), this account treats laughter as a passion with a determinate cause rather than a mysterious grace. It fits Hobbes’s wider portrait of human beings as comparers, always tallying advantage, honor, and reputation. Much humor fits the pattern he sketches: slapstick that makes another’s misstep our pleasure; witty exposure that reveals a contradiction we avoided; the small triumph of getting a joke before someone else. Even self-directed laughter conforms to the model, since it celebrates our present competence over a former failing and so flatters the ego without malice toward others.
The moral edge is deliberate. Hobbes wants to show that amusement is not purely benign; it is entangled with power, rank, and competition. Ridicule can wound, and societies often use it to police norms, marking what is foolish or contemptible. That helps explain why, in Hobbes’s political analysis, fear of being despised is a potent source of conflict and why public mockery can threaten authority by redistributing symbolic standing.
Later theories of humor have emphasized incongruity or emotional release, but Hobbes isolates a persistent current in laughter: the pleasure of feeling above. His account is at once sobering and clarifying. It illuminates why laughter can bond or bruise, why satire bites, and why we so often laugh when we win a small contest of understanding. The smile, on this view, is a brief coronation.
Set in the mechanistic psychology of Leviathan (1651), this account treats laughter as a passion with a determinate cause rather than a mysterious grace. It fits Hobbes’s wider portrait of human beings as comparers, always tallying advantage, honor, and reputation. Much humor fits the pattern he sketches: slapstick that makes another’s misstep our pleasure; witty exposure that reveals a contradiction we avoided; the small triumph of getting a joke before someone else. Even self-directed laughter conforms to the model, since it celebrates our present competence over a former failing and so flatters the ego without malice toward others.
The moral edge is deliberate. Hobbes wants to show that amusement is not purely benign; it is entangled with power, rank, and competition. Ridicule can wound, and societies often use it to police norms, marking what is foolish or contemptible. That helps explain why, in Hobbes’s political analysis, fear of being despised is a potent source of conflict and why public mockery can threaten authority by redistributing symbolic standing.
Later theories of humor have emphasized incongruity or emotional release, but Hobbes isolates a persistent current in laughter: the pleasure of feeling above. His account is at once sobering and clarifying. It illuminates why laughter can bond or bruise, why satire bites, and why we so often laugh when we win a small contest of understanding. The smile, on this view, is a brief coronation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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