- 2025年11月20日
A Study of “Laughter”: Festivals, Carnivals, and Their Connection to Philosophy
A Study of “Laughter”: Festivals, Carnivals, and Their Connection to Philosophy
From the Perspective of Contemporary Philosophy and Deconstruction
1. Laughter and Smiles Are Not the Same
To begin with a slightly self-indulgent confession: thinking about “what laughter is” has long been one of my life’s work themes. I no longer remember exactly what first prompted it, but I do remember one key realization:
“Laughter” on the one hand, and “smiles” or “gentle smiles” on the other, may share the same character in Japanese, but they actually refer to different phenomena.
“Smiles” and “smiling faces” usually express comfort, happiness, and relaxation. In contrast, “laughter” often erupts like a sudden ‘fit’. It is a kind of emotion, but at the same time it functions like a switch that changes one’s mental state before and after the moment of laughing.
Moreover, laughter tends to arise when something is perceived as “funny” or “strange” – in other words, when there is some kind of difference or discrepancy. Typically, we sense:
- Some kind of orthodoxy, normality, or authority, and
- Something that deviates from or falls outside that standard.
From this perspective, “laughter” starts to look like something that can be analyzed in fairly intellectual terms. Emotion is often treated as a black box, but laughter seems to offer a possible bridge between intellect and feeling.
I have long had hobbies that revolve around studying: collecting patterns of thought, theories, and structures. The more I do that, the more familiar I become with ways of thinking, frameworks, and modes of information processing. Yet emotion and motivation remain much more opaque, harder to systematize purely as “knowledge”.
Laughter, however, might provide a clue to connecting intellect and emotion. That intuition has been accumulating in me for some time, and I would like to try to articulate it here.
2. Emotions Are Hard for Philosophy to Handle – but Laughter Might Be an Exception
In philosophy—especially modern and contemporary Western philosophy—the center of gravity lies in epistemology and ontology.
Ethics and morality, questions of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, and the domain of emotional values and judgments are notably harder to handle in strictly philosophical terms.
Kant’s three Critiques are a good example:
- Critique of Pure Reason deals with epistemology and ontology, and thoroughly investigates the “intellect” (in the triad of intellect, emotion, and will).
- Critique of Practical Reason and
- Critique of Judgment address ethics, morality, aesthetic judgment, and so on.
Critique of Pure Reason remains a profoundly “rewarding read” even today, and within the overall history of philosophy, it has come to be seen as a necessary and unavoidable peak. By contrast, from the vantage point of today’s plural, non-Eurocentric world, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment often feel like this:
“As a historically situated value system, we can understand them.
But to read them today as if they were absolute, universal norms is much more difficult.”
Of course, even Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason can be relativized as “one possible way of thinking”, but there is now a fairly settled view that it is a theory whose compelling force is hard to ignore, given the trajectory of philosophy as a whole.
All of this points to a familiar pattern:
- Intellect (knowing, cognition) can be formalized and theorized comparatively well.
- Emotion and will (the “affective” and “conative” dimensions) are much more resistant to such formalization.
Within this context, “laughter as a part of emotion” stands out as a rare exception, something that philosophy might handle more easily than it handles emotions in general. That is one of the starting points of this essay.
3. Philosophers Have Long Been Interested in Laughter
Historically, philosophers have not completely ignored laughter. On the contrary, many have left at least brief reflections on it.
- Kant and Schopenhauer both discuss laughter, albeit in short passages.
- Bergson’s book Laughter is a relatively systematic exploration of the mechanisms of laughter within human society (several Japanese translations exist).
- In Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, the plot turns on the suppression of a lost section of Aristotle’s Poetics—a section about laughter. The entire series of mysterious deaths in the monastery is ultimately traced back to an attempt to seal away knowledge of laughter.
In Eco’s story, laughter is treated as forbidden knowledge, something dangerous to authority. This motif itself hints that laughter is not just an emotion but a phenomenon located at the crossroads of intellect, power, and faith.
Furthermore, there clearly exists a type of laughter that we might call:
“Laughter that cannot occur without a certain level of intelligence.”
Yes, there is the physiological laughter of babies when they are tickled. Recent research also suggests that certain animals show behaviors analogous to “laughter.”
But in addition to these, there are forms of laughter that require us to grasp:
- conversational context,
- multiple codes, and
- layered meanings
all simultaneously.
These are cases where laughter emerges not just “from” thought and conversation, but where thought and conversation are transformed into laughter.
It is precisely this moment of transformation where:
- structuralism and post-structuralism,
- Mahāyāna Buddhism (especially the Madhyamaka theory of emptiness), and
- modern “structural” mathematics (particularly category theory)
seem able to access laughter from their own angles.
One could say that these theories do not have very effective tools for dealing with emotion in general, but that “intellect-mediated laughter” is a rare emotional phenomenon that can, in fact, be brought under their theoretical purview.
4. The Basic Structure of Intellectual Laughter: Deviation from the “Proper”
Across the various philosophical and psychological accounts of laughter, a similar pattern emerges.
From my own long-standing reflections, a simple summary would be:
Intellectual laughter arises when we feel something is “odd” or “strange.”
However, this “odd” or “strange” is not just a matter of taste or personal preference.
Behind it, there is usually:
- Some standard of “correct,” “ordinary,” or “proper,” and
- A deviation or departure from that standard, which we perceive.
In more structural terms, we might say that intellectual laughter involves at least:
- Silent rules, expectations, or codes, and
- Departures from them—in the form of reversals, excess, insufficiency, or other distortions.
The combination of these two elements appears to be the minimal condition for intellectual laughter.
5. The Three Classical Theories of Laughter and Intellectual Laughter
5.1 “What Makes Something Funny?” – Three Classic Explanations
In philosophy and psychology, there are three well-known classic theories that try to answer “What makes something funny?” These are often called the three major theories of laughter:
- Superiority theory
- Incongruity theory
- Relief (or release) theory
Let us briefly review each.
(1) Superiority Theory
- This line of thought goes back to Plato and Hobbes.
- When we perceive the flaws, failures, or ridiculousness of others, we feel a sense of superiority, and that feeling gives rise to laughter.
- Bergson’s notion of “the mechanical encrusted upon the living” is also close to this line of thinking.
A somewhat more contemporary example is the manga Fist of the North Star, where the character Jūza of the Clouds laughs even as he is defeated and killed by Raoh. His laughter can be read as expressing:
- A kind of superiority that goes beyond simple victory or defeat, and
- A vantage point from which Raoh’s absolute seriousness itself becomes “laughable.”
In everyday life, this theory explains:
- Laughing at someone slipping on a banana peel,
- A character’s mistakes in slapstick comedy,
- The “boke” (fool) in a manzai duo, etc.
These are all situations where we observe someone else’s “slip” and feel that we are, relatively speaking, in a better position.
(2) Incongruity Theory
- Kant explains laughter as “the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.”
- Schopenhauer says that laughter arises from the discrepancy between concepts and intuitions—that is, between our conceptual understanding and the reality before our eyes.
- Modern “incongruity theories” are largely heirs to this tradition.
The classic example in Japanese comedy is the manzai double act: the “boke” and the “tsukkomi.”
- We expect the conversation to develop in a certain way,
- But it unexpectedly diverges—though not so far that we can’t understand what’s going on.
The key is that the incongruity appears within a comprehensible range.
Examples include:
- Someone saying something outrageous with a completely straight face,
- Deliberately mixing up everyday language and technical jargon,
- Holding a serious-looking press conference whose content is actually pure nonsense, etc.
(3) Relief Theory (Release of Tension)
- Associated above all with Freud.
- According to this theory, laughter is the release of psychological tension, especially tensions caused by repressed desires or fears, through jokes or wit.
- Black humor that turns social taboos into jokes is the paradigmatic case.
The late rakugo performer Shijaku Katsura is known to have conducted serious studies of laughter, and the core of his thinking was very close to this relief theory.
Typical examples include:
- Moments when pent-up emotion finally relaxes,
- Black jokes, sexual innuendo,
- Self-deprecating humor during war or disaster, etc.
5.2 Integrative Approaches: The “Benign Violation” Theory
More recently, a theory often cited as integrating these three lines is the Benign Violation Theory.
In brief, it claims that people tend to laugh when:
- There is some sort of violation—a taboo or rule is broken in some way;
- Yet the violation is perceived as benign—it does not pose a real threat, and can be processed as “play”;
- These two conditions—violation and benignness—are felt simultaneously.
In more structuralist terms:
- When the “violation” of social norms or meaning structures takes place within the bounds of play,
- Laughter arises as a form by which we accommodate or absorb that discrepancy.
5.3 Intellectual Laughter as the Overlapping Area of the Three Theories
These three theories are better understood as emphasizing different aspects of the same phenomenon rather than as mutually exclusive.
In the case of intellectual laughter, we can roughly say:
- Incongruity is almost a necessary condition.
- Superiority often appears in a meta-level way—as a sense of standing above or outside a given situation or system.
- Relief may also play a role, especially when the laughter releases social or psychological tension.
Taken together, the three theories overlap in a region we can identify as intellectual laughter.
Consider, for example, what happens when an official statement by a foreign ministry or a military organization is instantly turned into a prompt for mass “ogiri” (joke battles) on the internet:
- The official utterance carries a code of “seriousness” and “dignity.”
- Internet users overwrite it with jokes, memes, and parodies—an act of deviation.
- Viewers experience the pleasure of incongruity: “I didn’t think it could be interpreted that way!”
- At the same time, they feel a mild sense of superiority over the authority and a release from the oppressive gravity of politics or war.
In this way, the three classical theories of laughter intersect in online “festivals” and mass humor.
6. Necessary Conditions of Laughter – and What Else Is Needed
6.1 “Takeshi’s Detective Story” and the Phantom Joke Book
Let me recall an old Famicom (NES) game: “Takeshi no Meitantei” (Takeshi’s Detective Story).
Beat Takeshi was involved in its creation, playing the role of a detective solving a murder mystery.
In the story, there is a key item: a “phantom joke book”. Any comedian would kill for such a thing: a collection of flawless material that never fails to make people laugh.
Of course, nothing like that exists in real life. In that sense, we could say that there is no such thing as a sufficient condition that guarantees laughter in all cases.
On the other hand, the kinds of “deviation from the norm” that we see in the three major theories can be regarded as necessary conditions—but that alone is not enough. We need additional factors.
Let us consider a few of these.
6.2 Condition 1: Safety (Benignness)
As the Benign Violation Theory emphasizes, safety is crucial. No matter how brilliant a joke may be, if it appears to involve genuine danger—if someone’s life or livelihood seems seriously at risk—people will not laugh.
We may summarize this condition as follows:
- There may be something “odd” or “off,”
- But it must be perceived as safe, non-threatening, and relaxingly playful
for laughter to emerge.
6.3 Condition 2: Cognitive Accessibility (Being Understandable but Not Trivial)
Even the most sophisticated joke will fail if it is too difficult for the audience’s cognitive capacity; it will not even be recognized as a joke. Conversely, if it is too childish, it will not resonate either.
- Saying “poop!” is enough to make a first-grader laugh,
- But adults understand the intention without laughing.
- Puns (dajare) are a good example: simply pairing homophones is usually not enough. Some additional twist in meaning or context is required.
So, laughter has a sweet spot of cognitive difficulty: it needs to be understandable yet slightly surprising.
6.4 Condition 3: Context, Situation, and Timing (TPO and Meta-cognition)
A further condition is the ability to recognize the time, place, and occasion—what is commonly called TPO. This is a matter of meta-cognitive sensitivity.
- A joke in the wrong context can freeze the entire room.
- Few people would dare crack an off-color joke while being received in an imperial audience.
- One needs the ability to gauge whether humor fits the atmosphere.
In strongly authoritarian societies—for example, Cold War–era Eastern bloc countries—humor often does not fit in the official public sphere at all. Jokes and anecdotes move into the underground and become even more sharply honed as subversive black humor.
7. A Brief Category-Theoretic Glimpse: Emotions as Objects, Laughter as Morphisms
If we shift our perspective slightly, we can think of laughter as not merely an emotion but also as an operation that transforms one state into another.
In terms of category theory:
- Different emotional states can be seen as objects, and
- Transformations from one emotional state to another can be seen as morphisms.
Under this analogy, “laughter” might be a morphism that maps, say:
- “Tension” to “Relaxation”.
To be sure, constructing a complete and rigorous “category of emotions” is very difficult, but if it could be done, it would open the door to a more structural, systematized theory of affect. Laughter would then be one of the most interesting morphisms in that category.
8. Surveying Positive Emotions: Where Does Laughter Fit?
If we assume that “laughter” is a relatively special, intellect-intensive positive emotion, it may help to map out the broader landscape of positive (pleasant) emotions.
Drawing on psychology and philosophy (including Spinoza’s classification of affects), we can, for example, classify them along the axes of energy level and duration:
8.1 High-Energy, Short-Lived Emotions
These are affective states with high arousal and shorter duration:
- Joy / Ecstasy: Overwhelming pleasure, sometimes to the point of bodily trembling.
- Excitement: Heightened physiological arousal in anticipation of something.
- Enthusiasm: Overflowing energy directed toward an activity or cause.
- Exhilaration: The “refreshed” feeling after sports or solving a tough problem.
8.2 Low-Energy, Long-Lived States
These are relatively stable moods that form a foundation for well-being:
- Serenity: A sense of being safe and protected.
- Contentment: A feeling of “this is enough”—akin to the idea of “knowing sufficiency.”
- Relief: The easing of tension or pain; the “phew” moment.
- Peace / Calmness: A quiet mental state with little agitation.
8.3 Intellectual and Transcendent Emotions
These involve higher cognitive functions, much like intellectual forms of laughter:
- Curiosity: The desire to know and explore the unknown.
- Awe / Wonder: The feeling of being overwhelmed by vast nature or deep truth, sensing one’s own smallness.
- Flow: A state of immersion in an activity, where one loses self-consciousness and feels unity with what one is doing.
- Inspiration: Sudden flashes of insight or being “struck” by something meaningful.
8.4 Social and Relational Emotions
Emotions that arise in relation to others:
- Affection: A desire to be close to someone, to cherish them.
- Gratitude: Recognizing and appreciating benefits received from others.
- Respect: Acknowledging the value or competence of others; holding them in esteem.
- Trust: The sense that it is safe to rely on someone.
9. Surveying Negative Emotions: Anger, Anxiety, Sadness, and Self-Consciousness
We can likewise group negative emotions into several broad clusters.
9.1 Anger and Hostility (Outward-Directed Energy)
- Rage: Explosive, hard-to-control anger.
- Resentment: Sustained anger at perceived injustice.
- Contempt: Cold, dismissive feeling toward someone seen as inferior.
- Disgust: Strong rejection, both physiological and psychological.
- Jealousy / Envy: Fear of losing what one has, or painful desire for what others possess.
9.2 Fear and Anxiety (Avoidance and Vigilance)
- Fear / Terror: Reaction to an immediate, identifiable threat.
- Anxiety: Vague, future-oriented apprehension.
- Apprehension: A sense that something bad may happen.
- Panic: State of confusion and disorganization driven by overwhelming fear.
9.3 Sadness and Depressive States (Loss and Declining Energy)
- Grief: Deep sorrow after losing something or someone important.
- Melancholy: Pervasive heavy mood that does not easily lift.
- Despair: Feeling that all hope is lost.
- Lethargy / Apathy: Near absence of energy or emotions.
- Emptiness: Sense of meaninglessness or lack of value.
9.4 Self-Conscious Emotions (Inward-Directed Energy)
- Shame: Painful feeling that the self as a whole is bad, under the imagined gaze of others.
- Guilt: Pain arising from the sense that one’s actions have been wrong.
- Embarrassment: Awkwardness when one has violated a social norm in a minor way.
- Humiliation: Feeling of having one’s dignity attacked by others.
9.5 A Matrix of Intensity and Duration
We might map these emotions along two axes:
- Intensity (high vs. low)
- Duration (short vs. long)
For example:
- High intensity / short duration: rage, panic, outbursts of crying.
- Low intensity / long duration: chronic hostility, persistent anxiety, long-term ennui or melancholy.
Seeing them this way makes it clear that, even if we tried to treat all positive and negative emotions together, building a complete category-like system would be extremely difficult. Laughter may be modeled as a morphism between certain emotional states, but many other aspects of emotion resist such neat structuring.
10. Structuralism: “Oddness” and “Difference”
From here, we can connect laughter to structuralism and post-structuralism.
Structuralism, very roughly, is the idea that:
Beneath observable phenomena, there is an invisible structure—a network of relations—shaping them.
Applied to laughter:
- Every society has its implicit codes—language, etiquette, institutions, “common sense.”
- People usually live within these codes as if they were simply “the way things are.”
- Laughter emerges when these codes are slightly shifted or crossed with other codes.
The same utterance, for instance, can mean something completely different in a “serious” setting versus a casual one. In structuralist terms, laughter arises when a single event or statement simultaneously belongs to multiple structures:
- On code A, it reads as serious.
- On code B, it reads as ridiculous.
When we become aware of both codes at once, we experience intellectual laughter.
In this sense, laughter is a moment when differences between codes become visible. To borrow from Lévi-Strauss, it is a moment when the structure itself, and its arbitrariness, is exposed.
11. Post-Structuralism / Deconstruction as a Theory of Laughter?
Post-structuralism, especially Derrida’s notion of deconstruction, can almost be read as a highly abstract, philosophical version of a theory of laughter.
Deconstruction is not simply about destroying structures. Rather, it:
- Takes binary oppositions—such as male/female, reason/emotion, West/non-West, center/periphery, sane/insane, …
- Flips them, shifts them, or intertwines them,
- And in doing so reveals how arbitrary and contingent these oppositions really are.
When this maneuver is successful, we often find ourselves laughing in spite of ourselves.
Even in a very serious philosophical text, there may be a moment where we think:
“Ah, you flipped that? You shifted that point?”
And a quiet, intellectual laughter rises.
This is not mere laughter of superiority at someone else’s foolishness. It is more like:
- Realizing that what we had taken as absolutely solid structure
- Can be undone by a tiny shift in wording, quotation, irony, or parody
- And finding the very fragility of that structure funny.
In this sense, deconstructive reading could be called a highly intellectual “tsukkomi”—a clever comeback directed at the text itself.
In Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially in Madhyamaka, the denial of svabhāva (inherent, independent existence) is likewise a radical deconstruction of all supposed “substances” and “essences.”
From the standpoint that:
All things arise dependently (through pratītya-samutpāda) and have no independent self-nature,
even the most solemn concepts, institutions, and dogmas can start to look like elaborate jokes. There is a kind of laughter that seems close to enlightenment—a laughter that arises when one sees through the “seriousness” of all reified structures.
12. Yamamoto Shichihei’s “Multi-Oppositional Object Grasping” and Intellectual Laughter
Here we can bring in Yamamoto Shichihei’s idea of “multi-oppositional object grasping” (複対立的対象把握), which he uses to analyze Japanese modes of thought.
Very roughly, this is the idea of:
Viewing an object through multiple, overlapping axes of opposition.
Psychology offers an analogy in multi-factor analysis, or, more concretely, in personality tests such as the ego-gram. One familiar version evaluates personality along five axes:
- Nurturing Parent (NP): caring, nurturing, looking after others.
- Critical Parent (CP): strict, rule-oriented, morally judgmental.
- Adult (A): rational, logical, task-focused.
- Adapted Child (AC): compliant, dependent, eager to please.
- Free Child (FC): spontaneous, playful, emotionally expressive.
Each axis, if we insist on speaking in terms of “good” and “bad,” has both positive and negative aspects, whether it is high or low. There is no single dimension that we can simply label as “good when high, bad when low.”
This brings us to the fact that:
- Terms like “good” and “bad” are themselves extremely ambiguous and polysemous.
“Good,” for instance, can be translated into multiple English words:
- ethical or moral good (good)
- legally correct (lawful, legitimate)
- logically correct (valid)
- aesthetically pleasing (beautiful, elegant)
- skillful (excellent, expert), etc.
Without specifying which sense we mean, arguments about “good” and “bad” easily lapse into empty verbiage.
A notorious old cliché illustrates this:
“In bullying, the victim also has some fault.”
Without defining what “fault” or “badness” means, this is little more than an empty saying. The Japanese phrase “kūri kūron” (空理空論) – empty reasoning and empty argument – is apt here.
Interestingly, “kū” (emptiness), “ri” (reason/principle), and “ron” (discourse/theory) are all terms of great importance in both Eastern and Western thought, packed into a single expression.
In any case, “good” and “bad” themselves can be deconstructed rather quickly.
Western modern thought tends to organize the world along single axes of opposition:
- good / evil
- true / false
- subject / object
- scientific / non-scientific
Yamamoto argues that Japanese thinking, by contrast, often grasps the same object across multiple axes at once:
- law vs. “atmosphere” (kuuki),
- tatemae (official façade) vs. honne (true feelings),
- public vs. private,
- mythical worldview vs. pragmatic calculation, and so on.
People live by continuously switching which axis they foreground in any given situation.
If we now bring intellectual laughter into this, the fit is very good:
- On one axis, a certain behavior appears “serious” or “correct.”
- On another axis, the same behavior appears “ridiculous,” “self-contradictory,” or as merely the product of “atmosphere.”
- On yet another axis, it may appear “characteristically Japanese,” “thoroughly modern,” or “strongly religious,” and so on.
When multiple axes are simultaneously in view, the object appears as a bundle of contradictory meanings.
When we “get” this bundle all at once, we experience a form of intellectual laughter that links:
- Yamamoto’s multi-oppositional grasp,
- Post-structuralist deconstruction, and
- The laughter arising from seeing too much meaning and contradiction at once.
Online “festivals” are a vivid experimental field for this:
- A “serious” axis: international politics, war reporting.
- An “entertainment” axis: using those as raw material for jokes and memes.
- An “ethical” axis: criticizing the jokes as insensitive or immoral.
- A “meta” axis: analyzing all of this as media phenomena.
When these axes stand side by side, any given event becomes a dense packet of multi-oppositional meaning. Understanding this packet in a flash often comes with a peculiar, knowing laughter.
13. Laughter, Deconstruction, and the Internet/SNS Era
Festivals and Carnivals Online
We might say that the internet and social networking services are one of the most striking social realizations of contemporary thought.
In Japan, 2channel (now 5channel) was an early form of a large-scale anonymous bulletin board—arguably one of the world’s earliest and most intense online carnival spaces.
Japan used to be stereotyped as:
- lacking individuality,
- homogeneous and conformist,
- faceless and uniform.
Yet the exposure of Japanese anonymous bulletin boards and social media to the rest of the world has increasingly given outsiders the impression that Japanese net users are extremely individualistic and idiosyncratic, rich in persona and style. In that sense, the “Japan boom” may owe something to this “peeking in” at Japan’s grassroots online culture.
Hiroyuki Nishimura, founder of 2channel, is symbolic of this shift.
On SNS, we repeatedly see:
- festivals,
- collage images (kora),
- memes,
- flame wars,
- viral explosions.
Among these, festivals, collages, and memes are collective campaigns in which large numbers of people focus their energy on turning a given target into laughter and other shared affects.
Instead of a single thinker deconstructing a text in isolation, countless participants post in rapid succession, offering a flood of interpretations, rewritings, and parodies. The result is a level of relativization and deconstruction that would be impossible for any individual alone.
Bakhtin’s notions of polyphony and carnival, originally developed to analyze Rabelais and Dostoevsky, map almost seamlessly onto this environment. The key difference is scale:
- Today, practically anyone in the world can access the net and participate.
- AI even translates across languages, so that “nonsense translations” themselves become part of the meaning-making process.
From a Saussurean or Lévi-Straussian perspective, this is an immense, living laboratory of signs, codes, and structures. One suspects that if they were alive today, they would be delighted.
14. Festivals, Flame Wars, and the Transformation of Discourse: What Does Laughter Change?
Of course, even before the internet, there were intense intellectual debates and public controversies that deconstructed prevailing ideas. In Japan, the debate between Yamamoto Shichihei and Honda Katsuichi, described in Yamamoto’s Watashi no Naka no Nihon-gun (The Japanese Army in My Inside) and Nihonkyō ni Tsuite (On the Japanese Religion), is a well-known example.
One-to-one polemics of this kind can substantially shift public consciousness and even affect international relations, such as those between Japan and China.
If a debate between two individuals can change history, what happens in an era when hundreds of millions or billions of people can, in principle, participate? When a single event on the internet triggers a global festival or flame war, the potential impact on discourse and consciousness is enormous.
Here, my particular interest is in the side where laughter dominates—the side of “festival,” rather than mere rage-driven “flame.”
Think of:
- Meme attacks on ISIS propaganda,
- Public backlash against certain TV networks like Fuji Television,
- Jokes and memes targeting seemingly incompetent foreign ministries or military institutions.
In these cases, the target is not just criticized but laughed to pieces. After such an episode:
- The “fortunes” or “flow” around the target often change drastically.
- It feels, as in mahjong, as if the flow of the tiles has shifted.
Capitalism and modernization typically erode tradition and culture over the course of years or decades. But the Bakhtinian meta-carnival and giga-polyphony of internet festivals can bring about drastic changes in a matter of days or weeks.
In the language of public policy, we might speak of “education” or “awareness-raising” (keihatsu). Yet what happens in an online festival greatly exceeds such gradual processes in terms of speed and scale. It can rapidly transform:
- discourses,
- collective consciousness, and
- the perceived meaning of events.
15. Conclusion: Are Those Who Laugh the Strong Ones? Returning to Emotion
To sum up:
- Emotions in general are difficult for philosophy to handle.
- But intellectually mediated laughter can serve as a convenient experimental field linking:
- Classical theories of laughter (superiority, incongruity, relief),
- Structuralism’s focus on code and difference,
- Post-structuralist deconstruction, and
- Yamamoto Shichihei’s “multi-oppositional object grasping.”
In the era of the internet and SNS, the Japanese tradition of “festivals” has evolved into a global, digital device for deconstructing targets through laughter and polyphony. The result is:
- an extreme relativization of those targets,
- exposure of their “empty” structures, and
- transformation of “what they are” into something else.
Sometimes this leads to further development and evolution of the target; at other times, to rapid decline or collapse. In any case, laughter often acts as a trigger for major transformations.
During the Cold War, jokes and anecdotes from the Soviet Union, Eastern European socialist states, and Jewish communities circulated widely even outside those societies, and collections of such jokes sold well in the liberal democracies. In hindsight, it was the liberal democracies that “won” that historical confrontation.
This brings us to a famous ambiguity:
Do those who win in the end get to laugh?
Or is it those who keep laughing until the end that truly win?
In any case, humans lose when they themselves decide that they have lost. Those who, no matter how many times they are defeated, refuse to give up—who keep trying and continue laughing, even up to the very end—may never fully accept defeat in any deeper sense.
The ability to sustain that kind of bright, cheerful intelligence and emotional resilience is, in no small part, a gift of laughter.