That Theodor Adorno objects to laughter is not at all surprising: perhaps no twentieth-century philosopher is more closely associated with a melancholic ethos (Rose 2014). But as is the case with almost any topic treated by Adorno, his views on laughter are not as simple and straightforward as they might initially appear. Adorno exhibits an unyielding commitment to dialectical thinking, and while he certainly criticises laughter – especially that manufactured by the capitalist culture industry – he also grants laughter a privileged role in his account of the freedom offered by aesthetic experience. This chapter explores how Adorno resists the a/gelastic imperative to either support or oppose laughter in favour of practising a critical theory that conceives of laughter as a site of politics replete with both emancipatory potential and fascistic danger. In doing so, Adorno uncovers the social logic of gelopolitics and provides a model for the critical study of laughter today.

As described in the Introduction, contemporary scholarly and popular sources generally identify the human subject as the locus of laughter. The liberal discourse highlights laughter's capacity to emancipate the individual from falsehoods, while the Nietzschean discourse emphasises how laughter transforms logos itself. However, the subject-centrism of both approaches leaves us with an incomplete and inadequate picture of gelopolitics. In particular, it obscures how laughter arises within and exerts political effects on social structures of power and hierarchy that exceed and indeed constitute the human subject as a political animal. For instance, when I find myself laughing mindlessly along with the laugh-track of a mediocre sitcom (think The Big Bang Theory), can I really describe my laughter as a spontaneous eruption originating entirely within myself? Or is this laughter better understood as the product of an entertainment and advertising apparatus with interests of its own?