Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophies This.

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Today's episode is on an essay written by Henry Bergson called Laughter.

I hope you love the show today.

So maybe the best place to begin this episode is to talk about laughter as a marker of happiness.

Should we consider laughter to be a true marker of happiness?

Like, if we see someone who laughs all the time,

can we reasonably assume that that person is happy?

Well, if not, can we assume that laughter is a good thing for us and in of itself?

I think most people would say it is.

I think most people would say we should try to laugh as much as possible.

Laughter is one of the most joyful experiences you can possibly have as a human being.

Don't believe me, look at any antidepressant commercial.

I mean, when they're reading off all the side effects,

there's always somebody frowicking through the park, laugh at about something.

Don't know exactly what, but they sure look a lot happier than me.

What's funny is, regardless of how much we value laughter and aim towards it in our daily lives,

when philosophers throughout history have tried to take a philosophical approach towards understanding

why we laugh at things, the reasons we laugh often seem to carry with them some sort of negative

connotation. We'll be looking at a few of them here today. Now, most historians of Western

philosophy will say that the first theories offered for why we laugh at things came out of ancient

...