Death by Laughter

Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy?Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorized and demonized, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never before, with irreversible social and political consequences. As female enjoyment became a surefire promise of profitability, alarmist tales of women laughing themselves to death epitomized the tension between subversive pleasure and its violent repression.Hennefeld traces the social politics of women’s laughter from the heyday of nineteenth-century sentimentalism to the collective euphoria of early film spectatorship, traversing contagious dancing outbreaks, hysteria photography, madwomen’s cackling, cinematic close-ups, and screenings of slapstick movies in mental asylums. Placing little-known silent films and an archive of remarkable, often unusual texts in conversation with affect theory, comedy studies, and feminist film theory, this book makes a timely case for the power of hysterical laughter to change the world.

Just about everything in this book is a delight. Writing with ferocious wit and drawing from an extraordinary archive, Hennefeld historicizes the significance of laughter for gendered and racialized bodies in modern media culture. This is what feminist cultural theory and history looks like at its very best., A tour de force of feminist historiography through cinema’s early archive of hysterical laughter! In a time of perpetual carnival, what promise can laughter still hold? Moving us beyond both capitalist gimmick and revolutionary excess, Hennefeld carefully excavates the affective cluster held in tension by a burst of laughter on the brink of death., This stunningly original and altogether insightful book had me in stitches. At times, I giggled quietly, and other times, I laughed out loud. But, time and time again, I was left with new and thought-provoking ideas while reading this side-splitting mash-up of film history, feminist theory, and cultural criticism., Death by Laughter is an astonishing and astonishingly rich plunge into the stormy waters of laughter. Focusing particularly on hysterical laughter in its political dimension, the book presents us with a remarkable amount of fascinating material, including the extremely interesting but almost forgotten archives of early cinema. Hennefeld navigates this material both boldly and carefully, masterfully relating it to our contemporary social, political, and cultural context.

Maggie Hennefeld is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia, 2018), co-curator of the silent film collection Cinema’s First Nasty Women (2022), and coeditor of Unwatchable (2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (2020).