Laughing with Leviathan: Hobbesian Laughter in Theory and Practice

• Author: Zachariah Black
• Date: 01 June 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720952056
• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720952056

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(3) 431 –456

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720952056

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Article

Laughing with Leviathan:

Hobbesian Laughter in

Theory and Practice

Zachariah Black1

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes’s infamously severe accounts of the phenomenon of laughter

earned the condemnation of such varied readers as Francis Hutcheson and

Friedrich Nietzsche, and he has maintained his reputation as an enemy of

humor among contemporary scholars. A difficulty is raised by the fact that

Hobbes makes ample use of humor in his writings, displaying his willingness to

evoke in his readers what he appears to condemn. This article brings together

Hobbes’s statements on laughter and comedic writing with examples of his

own humorous rhetoric to show that Hobbes understands laughter as a

species of insult, but that there are conditions under which humor can be

made to serve the cause of peace. Drawing on evidence from across Hobbes’s

works, and in particular from an understudied discussion of “Vespasian’s law”

in the Six Lessons, this essay theorizes the conditions under which Hobbes

found witty contumely to be conducive to peace. On this reading, Hobbes

models the discreet use of humorous rhetoric in defense of peace, a defense

that will be ongoing even after the commonwealth has been founded. Hobbes

offers insight into how we can remain attuned to laughter’s inegalitarian

tendencies without foregoing the equalizing potential to be found in laughing

at ourselves and at those who think too highly of themselves.

Keywords

Thomas Hobbes, laughter, civility, rhetoric

1Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Zachariah Black, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Sidney Smith Hall,

Room 3018, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada.

Email: zak.black@mail.utoronto.ca

952056PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720952056Political TheoryBlack

research-article2020

432 Political Theory 49(3)

The first major refutation of Thomas Hobbes’s grim account of laughter came

from Francis Hutcheson in 1725. At the beginning of his three-part Reflections

Upon Laughter, the teacher of Adam Smith connected what he saw as Hobbes’s

misunderstanding of laughter to a more fundamental misunderstanding of

human nature. Hobbes, who “very much owes his character as a Philosopher to

his assuming positive solemn airs,” had as his “grand view” to “deduce all

human actions from Self-Love”; in so doing, he “overlooked every thing which

is generous or kind in human kind.” Because of his narrowness of vision,

Hobbes’s philosophy “represents men in that light in which a thorow knave or

coward beholds them.”1 His commitment to seeing everything through the

prism of “Self-Love” caused Hobbes to mistake the most self-aggrandizing

dimension of laughter, “ridicule,” for the whole of the phenomenon.2

A century and a half after Hutcheson, Friedrich Nietzsche joined the

attack. For Nietzsche, Hobbes was a “genuine Englishman” who “tried to

make laughing a defamation of character among all thinking men.” True phi-

losophers ought to be elevated to the level of the gods by a “golden laughter”

at “the expense of all serious things.”3 Despite the theoretical chasm that

otherwise separates Nietzsche and Hutcheson, Nietzsche similarly suggested

that Hobbes had failed to find a place for laughter in human life as a result of

his narrow view of human nature. On this reading, Hobbes’s petty definition

of laughter epitomizes the pettiness of his political theory.

Contemporary political theorists who have engaged Hobbes’s accounts

of laughter have enriched but not contradicted the assessments of Hutcheson

and Nietzsche, finding in Hobbes an enemy of laughter. For instance, David

Heyd echoes Hutcheson in writing that “Hobbes’s entire psychology is

founded on the assumption of human egocentricity. . . . Hobbes’s superior-

ity theory of laughter suits this theoretical framework.”4 Beyond Hobbes

scholarship, Hobbes has come to represent the “superiority thesis,” which

explains laughter as a sudden outward expression of one person’s sense of

superiority over another.5 There is good evidence for the consensus view. In

chapter 6 of Leviathan, Hobbes describes “Sudden glory” as “the passion

which maketh those grimaces called LAUGHTER, and is caused either by

some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them, or by the apprehension of

some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly

applaud themselves.”6 While Hobbes nowhere says that laughter is “a seri-

ous infirmity which every thinking man will strive to overcome,” as

Nietzsche had claimed, he does say that “much laughter at the defects of

others is a sign of pusillanimity.”7

There are cracks in the consensus view, however. If Hobbes’s condem-

nation of laughter is as thorough as Leviathan’s definition of sudden