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Sudden Glory (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive Activity surveys the history of human behavior—specifically, the history of laughter. In this history, Barry Sanders unlocks a number of other important stories: the relationship of humans to authority, for example, and the interconnections among joking, language, and literature. Most important, Sanders argues the subversive nature of laughter: that in the face of religious or political authority, laughter can become as powerful a force as war and break the stranglehold that civilized behavior often demands of people. As the ancients...

[The entire page is 1955 words long]