Postscript: Hispanic Flemish Hotchpotch

Abstract

Two rather contradictory views on the position of laughter and humour in early modern and modern society have informed my quest in this book. The first one is the Bakhtinian hypothesis of a shrivelling down of the magical importance of powerful laughter from the absolutist seventeenth century onwards. The second one, until recently hardly discussed but one of the great caveats of modern Western society, is that humour is one of the finest products of civilized society. Both views are not necessarily closely related to each other, one can argue, because laughter is not exactly the same as humour and that is, indeed, true. Laughter may and may not be the outcome of humour and, on the other hand, laughter may have nothing whatsoever to do with humour and may be provoked by anger, tickling or sincere friendship. Yet, when focusing on the early modern period, my impression is that both were much more closely connected than we tend to think in retrospect. After all, it is presumably only since Romanticism that humour has been linked to Weltschmerz.