Life & Wisdom Quote by Agnes Repplier

Laughter, for Agnes Repplier, isn’t polite entertainment; it’s a small jailbreak. Calling it “lawless” yanks humor out of the drawing room and back into the body, where impulse outruns decorum. The line works because it frames comedy as a flirtation with disorder: the moment we laugh, we’re briefly ungovernable, less interested in rules than in release.

Repplier wrote as a late-19th- and early-20th-century essayist steeped in moral language and social codes, especially the tight choreography of respectability expected of her class and era. In that context, “lawless” carries a double charge. It’s a warning label from a culture that prized self-control, and it’s a sly endorsement of what that culture tried to repress. Laughter becomes the socially acceptable way to misbehave without quite being caught: you can’t prosecute a giggle, but it can still topple a pompous speech, puncture a sanctimonious pose, or expose a taboo everyone’s pretending not to see.

The subtext is that humor is not neutral. It’s powered by appetite, envy, irreverence, even cruelty - the same unruly energies that etiquette and religion attempt to domesticate. Repplier doesn’t romanticize this; she names it plainly. That’s the elegance of the sentence: one clean moral adjective (“lawless”) gives laughter teeth. In an age obsessed with propriety, she locates comedy’s true engine where propriety fears to look.