Chapter 23 - Audience Laughter

Summary

This chapter sets out to establish what Molière’s prefaces and meta-theatrical plays tell us about audience laughter. In these texts, Molière sets up the notion of an ideal public, primarily by means of spectator characters who act as models or counter-models in terms of reception. His laughing characters allow us to understand the link between Molière and the laughter of a public that saw itself in them. In this way, Molière echoes wider contemporary discourse on comedy at the same time as contributing to its development. He offers reflections on parody, on the connection between audience laughter and poetics, on the relationship of the social aspects of audience laughter to moral decency and on laughter as an indication of a comic author’s merit. His spectator characters reflect a contemporary discourse that saw laughter as an entirely legitimate reaction to the performance of comedies, and Molière is thereby situated at the heart of the critical re-evaluation of laughter that occurred between 1660 and 1670, of which he was at once a beneficiary and one of the driving forces.