Both Cicero and Francis Bacon regarded deformity as the most frequent cause of laughter.
The cause of laughter is a difficult subject, humor having much the sam unpredictable reaction as alcohol.
For Lewis, laughter is what being might look like from the point of view of non-being; and antagonism, which puts being at risk, is the primary cause of laughter.
While the Superiority Theory says that the cause of laughter is feelings of superiority, and the Relief Theory says that it is the release of nervous energy, the Incongruity Theory says that it is the perception of something incongruous something that violates our mental patterns and expectations.
As a side effect of our search for side effects, we also list pathological causes of laughter, among them epilepsy (gelastic seizures), cerebral tumours, Angelman's syndrome, strokes, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or motor neuron disease.
The warm breeze on his face, the ring of a bell, and especially the sounds of his brother playing with other children would cause fits of laughter; it was one of the best sounds we had ever heard".
The Amis hero, in the same situation, would discover that he actually feels grief when his mother dies; it is the embarrassed display of it that makes him uneasy, and is the cause of sad laughter.
His fractious youth is now "the cause of great laughter" in his family; he is lucky that his own 14-year-old son Finlay, from his marriage to actor Susannah Harker, isn't giving his father the same hell.
If, indeed, experiential evidence is wanted, it might be found up there in my natal far north, where this whole polar vortex thing is a cause of mordant laughter, since what they are experiencing, and have been for many years now, might be called the "Manhattan inflow".
His friend and colleague, Lt. Raymond O'Hanlon, caused ripples of laughter by describing what he called Firefighter Beddia's sixth sense: the ability to "spot a beautiful woman 1,000 yards out in a fog at night".
I sat on a leather sofa, gently sweating away in the fairylit Ribarhús (the Faroese certainly know a thing or two about central heating) picking up knitting tips and causing shrieks of laughter for asking if one woman's sweater – about the size of a hot water bottle – was for her husband.
