Laughter Back to the Universe - The 1970s

Laughter Back to the Universe - The 1970s

Masao Yamaguchi's "Laughter Lecture" is positioned as an important text for relativizing established values in the Japanese thought circles of the 1970s. In this era of rapid economic growth, society was covered by a management structure that emphasized efficiency and rationality, and human emotions and physicality were gradually being suppressed. While the student movement came to an end and political passions cooled, thought and art began to search for "dissimilarity to the system" and "resistance to form. Yamaguchi's "Laughter Lecture" was an attempt to rediscover fundamental human freedom through the act of "laughter" from the perspective of cultural anthropology in response to such social blockages.

The "laughter" he speaks of is neither mere entertainment nor humor, but rather a "cosmic movement" that instantly dissolves the dichotomies of right and wrong, reason and madness, life and death. In the background of his thought, one can see the influence of the ritual culture and carnival theory he has studied, as well as Mikhail Bakhtin's "Cultural History of Laughter," among others. Yamaguchi presents the Eastern concept of "laughter without an object"-the laughter of the kanzanjutsu (the cold mountain picking up) and the laughter of Zen monks-as a counterpoint to the Western concept of reason-centeredness. Laughter functions as a moment of "liberation" that temporarily overturns order and nullifies fixed differences in society.

At the time, society was becoming increasingly conservative politically, and the media and literature were becoming increasingly commodified. In such an era, Yamaguchi's "Laughter Lecture" was read as an ideological movement like a "festival" that reintegrated the world through laughter. His words, "Laughter brings man back from the center to the universe," were not only a criticism of self-centered modern rationalism, but also a declaration for man to once again live in harmony with the rhythm of life as part of the cosmic order. Laughter is no longer a play, but a moment of contact with truth--its innocent brightness shining through the darkness of the thought of the 1970s.