Il piacere della risata

Una bella risata, c'è poco di più piacevole. Eppure la risata pare sia ancora un mistero. Ne parla Mary Beard, prof. di Classics all'University of Cambridge e autrice del libro Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (University of California Press). "The pleasure and excitement of studying laughter, for a historian, is that it generates many more questions than answers. Theories of laughter have always been "theories of theories," a way of talking about laughter and "something else." Recent neurological advances in understanding which bits of the brain generate laughter (and how) are, of course, important, and not to be dismissed by decidedly nonexperimental historians.
But in historical terms, culture almost always trumps nature. Laughter has been a key marker of what we feel about other cultures, about our own past and our views of the "progress of civilization." chronicle.