In the magazine world the end of the year always brings a generous harvest of readers' recommendations, word-of-mouth in print: they select, from the last 12 months, the books that most forcefully stand out in memory, sometimes including an unheralded treasure you might have missed.

It's in that spirit that I bring to your attention "Barry Sanders's Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History" (Beacon, 328 pp.; $27.50). Sanders's book is a cultural history of attitudes toward laughter from antiquity to the present (backed up by a 40-page bibliography). For Aristotle, Sanders reminds us, laughter "separates human beings so conclusively from the rest of the animals that [he] chose to refer to us creatures as animal ridens, 'the beast who laughs.' " If that Aristotelian emphasis strikes you as merely quaint, Sudden Glory will change your mind, so rich is its exploration of the meaning of laughter. (Sanders can be heard talking about his previous book, "A Is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age," just out in paperback [Vintage, 288 pp.; $12], on the September/October 1995 issue of the Mars Hill Tapes.)

Space doesn't permit us here to follow the twists and turns of Sanders's argument (and there is plenty to argue with), but one salient theme seems particularly pertinent to questions we'll be wrestling with in B&C. The church figures prominently in Sanders's account as a repressive force, seeking to subdue laughter. Quoting dour authorities from Basil the Great in the fourth century ("The Christian … ought not to laugh nor even to suffer laugh-makers") to Hugh of Saint Victor in the twelfth century ("Joy may be good or evil, depending on its source, but laughter is in every respect evil"), Sanders suggests that this negative attitude toward laughter derived in part from "the sobriety of Christ" taken as a model for the Christian life ("serious, solemn, devoid of any trace of joyous laughter"), in part from authority's perennial uneasiness with laughter, which by its very nature is subversive. (For an alternative tradition in the medieval church, the carnivalesque, see Alan Jacobs's essay on Mikhail Bakhtin, in this issue.)

So as you might expect, this history of laughter is a stirring tale of liberation, culminating in the apotheosis of Lenny Bruce. But there are unexamined contradictions in Sanders's narrative. On the one hand, he is a decent man who sees laughter as resistance against oppression and celebrates in particular the long-suppressed voices of women. On the other hand, he is a disciple of Nietzsche, and he is honest enough to recognize that laughter is often cruel. What, after all, could more be ridiculous, more deliciously laughable than weakness--the way that fool was still trying to hold his pants up when we blew his brains out.

Sanders doesn't see what the logic of his own account makes clear. Free of all restraint, laughter becomes nihilistic. Ha ha ha mutates into a curse, and finally into the rictus of death. How do we draw boundaries without falling into the excesses of the church fathers--or the excesses of campus speech-codes? There is no simple answer. We work and pray and laugh.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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