I was particularly taken by a question that Norbert Elias poses in his essay on laughter, reckoning with the often contradictory purpose of laughter. He asks, “Is laughter an expression of our revolt and a relief from social constraint? Or is it a social corrective, punishing us if we do not conform?”. This dichotomy plagues Parvulescu and Hanich, as well—the latter of which partitions the act of laughing in a prescriptive typology. However, as I revisited a scene from Housefull 2 (2012), it was evident that Parvulescu’s description of the film-comedy as a “laughing-gas party”, inviting the viewer to join in on a mass hysteria, rung true of a film released almost a century after Chaplin’s Laughing Gas (1914).
The following sequence is incited by a ragtag pair of A/C technicians, who mistakenly replace the vent’s oxygen with nitrous oxide. What is worse is that this comedy-of-errors unfolds at Buckingham Palace, where the film’s cast is joined by (what I think is a strikingly accurate impersonation of) the Queen of England.
The pretence of high-society collapses into a fit of silliness, as the esteemed guests spiral out of control and the Queen, herself, begins to inexplicably speak in a local Indian dialect. I remember watching this scene in a crowded theatre in India, where an active mode of spectatorship is socio-culturally instilled within all. The crowd slowly became infected with this contagion, as if the laughing gas had somehow sublimated through the image’s projection. There is a democratising quality to this communal pang of laughter—as G.K Chesterton attempts to define, “an escape into a world where things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness”. And it is, without a doubt, significant that this Hindi-language film is transgressing upon codified rules of decorum that were previously enforced by the British Raj.
But is it true then that, in this unified response, the film’s characters and the film’s audience are depersonalised, or worse, subconsciously impelled to conform? Are we simply acting as a co-operative viewer, acquiescing to the film without a critical eye? I don’t personally believe that nonsense in non-productive or perhaps, a method of political control. Hanich argues that “it can also imply solidarity when we actively laugh because we do not want to devalue the laughing response of the others by remaining ostentatiously silent”, participating in a uniquely human act that—which although sometimes embarrassing—indulges us in a transcendent feeling of community.