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Risible explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Casadei approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. This buried genealogy of laughter re-emerges with explosive force thanks to the binding of laughter to sound reproduction technology in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing case studies ranging from the early global market for phonographic laughing songs to the McCarthy-era rise of prerecorded laugh tracks, Casadei convincingly demonstrates how laughter was central to the twentieth century’s development of the very category of sound as not-quite-human, unintelligible, reproductive, reproducible, and contagious.

About the Author

Delia Casadei is a scholar, writer, and translator based in Italy and the UK. Her articles on the relationship of language, voice, ideology, and history in twentieth-century music and sound practices have been published by Cambridge Opera Journal, The Opera Quarterly, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Representations.

Reviews

"A virtuoso meditation on laughter, music, and sound reproduction, moving from transfixing insights drawn from philosophical texts and recorded sound objects to a bold vision of laughter as a sonorous force that troubles our conceptions of humanity and rationality. How sounds acquire meaning, how they make sense or nonsense or lie somewhere between the two: Delia Casadei's Risible considers these fundamental issues in startling and thought-provoking ways."—Carolyn Abbate, coauthor of A History of Opera

"There is something thrillingly unclassifiable about this book. While it indexes music studies, it is clearly a profound work of cultural theory. Casadei reveals how laughter—a deceptively minor though ubiquitous phenomenon—holds relevance for every dimension of life and its biopolitical regulation via gender, race, labor, and reproduction. She also reminds us that there is much genealogical work yet to be done on mediatized, electrified soundworlds of the twentieth century and offers a powerful, welcoming push in new directions."—Amy Cimini, author of Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life

"Casadei's imaginative and provocative book deploys an inventive blend of historical and philosophical modes. By turns incisively argued and methodologically playful, it navigates between musicology, sound studies, and the history of ideas in fascinating, often beguiling ways."—Naomi Waltham-Smith, author of Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life

"Casadei's study of the sound of laughter offers a fresh account of an everyday phenomenon that both fascinates and eludes us."—Anca Parvulescu, author of Laughter: Notes on a Passion