Death From Laughter, Female Hysteria, and Early Cinema: Maggie Hennefeld

maggie hennefeld
Death from Laughter, Female Hysteria, and Early Cinema
Between hysterical laughter and gasp- Thrown into a fit of laughter by the
ing amazement, I have never seen an receipt of a funny postcard, Miss Mary
audience more thoroughly entertained. Hogan [. . .] laughed herself nearly to
—“Across the Silver Sheet” death before her paroxysms could be
checked by a couple of physicians and a
severe scolding from her father. [. . .] He
was so severe that her hysteria subsided
She laughed hysterically when asked if and finally she could control herself.
she possessed hypnotic power, and said —“Comic Post Card Nearly Kills”
if she did possess it, she would use it in
making her husband work instead of
making her living by telling fortunes.
—“Seeks Relief from Bonds”
W hat separates the colloquial expression “hysterical laugh-

ter” (as in the “hysterical laughter” of an audience) from the violent thresh-
old at which excessive laughter becomes actually hysterical? Laughter
and hysteria, which share uncannily parallel but strangely noncontiguous
histories, have often converged at the very limit between life and death. In
the mid-nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, hundreds of women
allegedly died from laughing too hard. Any activity in modern life—going
to the circus, playing bridge, or salting pork in the kitchen—could become a
gateway to the convulsions of hysterical laughter for women. In this article, I
look at death from laughter as a limit case that blows open the long-standing
separation between laughter and hysteria in scholarship on these topics.
Whereas the colloquial use of hysteria to qualify laughter reduces the ill-
ness to a figure of speech (that is, “I laughed hysterically”), laughter itself
has been systematically ignored in even the most comprehensive studies of
clinical hysteria. I argue that women’s hysterical laughter failed to register as
either laughter or hysteria. Between jubilation and mental illness, women’s
uproarious laughter, instead, gave way to sudden death.
Volume 27, Number 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-3696631
© 2016 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
46 Death from Laughter, Female Hysteria, and Early Cinema
For example, in 1893, Bertha Pruett was entertaining guests at

her home in Philadelphia, one of whom, a young man, was “a noted wit. One
of his remarks threw Miss Pruett into a violent fit of laughter, which lasted
some minutes, when it suddenly changed to a cry of pain and she fell to the
floor. Blood gushed from her nose and mouth and medical assistance was
summoned, but before anything could be done [. . .] she was dead” (“Killed”).
Stories such as these, evidently, revealed women’s laughter to be fatal. In
contrast, hysterical symptoms were quintessentially erasable. The revers-
ibility of hysterical symptoms represented an abiding fixation for clinical
neurologists and psychologists. Lacking an organic cause to diagnose, clini-
cians sought to undo the appearances of inexplicable ailments tormenting
the body by locating deeper sources of conflict in the mind.
Psychologists and neurologists, including Joseph Babinski, Josef
Breuer, Pierre Briquet, Jean-Martin Charcot, Sigmund Freud, and Pierre
Janet, have for the most part reduced laughter to a footnote in their writings
on a ragbag of hysterical symptoms from catatonia, motor impairments,
phantom paralysis, and fugue states to uncontrollable hiccupping, yawning,
barking, and globus pharyngis (the sensation of a “lump in the throat”). The
literalism of women’s hysterical laughter, in the context of clinical hysteria,
was viewed implicitly as unnoteworthy and only briefly detailed (or omitted
entirely) from exhaustive case studies on this disorder. While the hysterical
laughter of the female hysteric was rendered unremarkable, the hysterical
laughter of the allegedly normal woman was, in contrast, characterized as
unnatural, obscene, dangerous, and potentially lethal. Excessive, embodied,
and involuntary laughter was simply not meant for women’s bodies, because
it might kill them (and often did).1 Death from laughter thereby represented
a warning to women, a gendered deterrent from laughing in either the public
or private sphere (for the home was no less hazardous to female laughers
than the circus).
Female hysterics, unlike ordinary women, were encouraged to
exhibit their symptoms. Hysterics were thus characterized as repressed
women who spoke with their bodies, representing unrepresentable ideas and
desires through a vast array of somatic complaints (from somnambulism to
blurred vision to laughter). For example, one of Charcot’s patients, Henriette
A., suffered from paralysis of her right arm (induced as a latent reaction to a
blow on the head from a fallen bookshelf ). Charcot put her under hypnosis
and publicly exhibited the fantastic reversal of her paralysis: by the end,
Henriette “pranced round among the audience vigorously shaking them by
the [right] hand, desirous of proving how real was the recovery they had just
d i f f e r e n c e s 47
witnessed” (Charcot 405). While a humorous idea could allegedly murder a

woman by inciting her hysterical laughter, even the violence of a collapsing
bookshelf apparently only produced psychosomatic and impermanent effects
on the body of the laughing female hysteric.
The line between women’s hysterical laughter and the marvelous
pageantry of female hysteria thus intersected with modernity’s collapsing
boundaries between reality and illusion, between movement and stillness,
and between prolonged life and unforeseeable death. I further argue that
early cinema—public exhibitions that displayed movement through the rapid
projection of still photograms—co-emerged with the hysterical plenitude
of women’s pleasure and female insanity. Although early cinema is not the
central focus of this essay,2 I emphasize the fundamental importance of early
film practices in mediating the collision and collusion between women’s
laughter and female hysteria in modern mass culture. The advent of early
cinema provided a technological remedy to female hysteria.
Moving pictures animated and exhibited the spectacular muta-
bility of all sorts of bodily afflictions. For example, characters in early films
easily dismember and reattach their own limbs, accidentally ingest every-
thing from clarinets to cameramen, and even survive their own incinera-
tion, decapitation, and evisceration. Comical films displaying such fantastic
or hysteric corporeality, I argue, participated in democratizing contagious
laughter, offering male and female spectators alike the occasion to laugh
openly without fear of fatal escalation.
The laughing female hysteric and the hysterically laughing
woman—two overarching doppelgänger figures—collided headlong in the
bodies of early film spectators and in their experiences of the frequently
solicitous, comical, and shape-shifting representations of women’s bodies
onscreen. I thereby situate the striking oppositions between hysterically
laughing women and female laughing hysterics through the archives of
early cinema. Film spectatorship not only offered women a space to laugh
safely but also emerged as a visual cure to nervous hysteria.
The Singular Case of Miss Esther Wakefield
In 1899, a young woman named Esther Wakefield was allegedly

bit by a “kissing bug”: a little black bug about an inch long that afflicted
North Americans by pricking them on their upper lips, usually while they
slept. This melanolestes picipes (Black Corsair) molested good citizens and
fascinated entomologists. Its venomous bite would cause severe swelling and
dark scarlet coloring of the lip, lasting for up to twenty-four hours. It was
called the “kissing bug” not because it provoked an overwhelming desire to
run around kissing everyone, but because the bug’s bite itself was compared
to a kiss. In 1899, however, a young female stenographer from Chicago, who
was allegedly nipped by this kissing bug while she was lounging in a ham-
mock, experienced a number of inexplicable and unforeseen symptoms
beyond the usual pain and swelling.
The Chicago Chronicle’s reporting of this incident bears circula-
tion 116 years later: “The singular case of Miss Esther Wakefield has attracted
much attention in both medical and lay circles [. . .]. [She is] a modest, refined,
cultured young woman, the last person in the world to give way to foolishly
emotional feeling, the last person in the world to yield to femininely ner-
vous impulses” (“Is Affected”).3 All of this changed, however, after Esther’s
kissing bug bite, which sent her into “a state of high hysteria”:
Miss Wakefield was [overcome by] fits of boisterous laughter and

evinced spasmodic desire to embrace and kiss all those about
her. As the night grew, Miss Wakefield’s symptoms increased in
violence and it was with difficulty that she could be restrained.
[. . .] The application of anesthetics was necessary to save the
girl’s life, and for 12 hours she was given over to the influence of
ether. [. . .] The girl passed a quiet day and night. The spasmodic
laughter ceased entirely and the impulsive disposition to embrace
attendants disappeared.
Several days later, Miss Wakefield “felt quite restored” and proceeded about
her daily business. “The day passed as usual, and at 5 o’clock she boarded a
street car from her office to home.” When Miss Wakefield’s streetcar entered
a dark passageway, however, the sudden change in lighting, coupled with
the discontinuous movement of the vehicle, brought on a renewed hysterical
attack. The episode is described like a scene out of an early film comedy, such
as What Happened in the Tunnel (Edison, United States, 1903) or A Kiss in
the Tunnel (G. A. Smith, Britain, 1899),4 in which women ward off unwanted
sexual attention by using the risk and vulnerability associated with dark
tunnels as opportunities for comic sight gags:
Fellow riders aboard that car were startled by a sudden burst of

laughter, strident, shrill, almost uncanny, and by the spectacle
of a sudden seizing of the conductor in a fervid embrace and the
implanting upon his embarrassed lips of half a dozen swift and
burning kisses by as charming a girl as one might find in many a

long day. Nor did she stop at the conductor. A fat passenger who
was quite old enough to deserve a better fate was the next happy
victim of these delicious assaults, and then with a wild laugh,
she fastened upon a third. The car was stopped and a policeman
called. The girl had entered upon no less than a fit of hysterical
laughter.
So again Esther was anesthetized and again showed signs of improving but
yet again relapsed into crazy fits of maniacal laughter and raging female
libido. Esther’s case began to attract national attention from doctors and
neurologists, who traveled to Chicago to study her peculiar symptoms.
Of the many very puzzling aspects of Esther’s predicament, including the
inexplicable slippage between her kiss-like bug bite and her overwhelming
mania for publicly embracing strange men,
[h]ere is what still puzzles the physicians and seems to be giving

a black eye to science—every other day the girl is seemingly well.
Every other day she has a violent relapse into that unaccountable
condition of hysteria, or mania, bursts into terrific gales of laugh-
ter, and seeks to thrust upon whomsoever she can her mouthful
of fervent kisses. The medical faculty of the big city shop is all at
sea over this queer case. To them the most peculiar aspect of Miss
Wakefield’s ailment is that she is wholly completely rational on
her days of sanity—is utterly totally irresponsible on her days of
hysteria. [. . .] The contention is made that no stranger malady
than this has ever undergone the study of physicians.5
Esther’s “kissing bug” literalizes the popular nomenclature for a pestilent

insect, yet what really gives “a black eye to science” is the doppelgänger dual-
ity embodied by this singular young woman. If Miss Wakefield upholds the
traditional ideals of classical femininity—“a modest, refined, cultured young
woman”—then Esther the raving hysteric gleefully defies all of these Victo-
rian constraints with her “terrific gales of laughter” and her overwhelming
desire “to thrust upon whomsoever she can her mouthful of fervent kisses.”
Esther’s split personality must have struck readers in 1899 as a
familiar trope, if not a cliché. Literature of the time abounded with warring
doppelgängers, whose internal struggles between enlightened rationality
and unrepressed carnality mapped productively onto emergent topogra-
phies of the psyche. Unlike Robert Louis Stevenson’s conflicting alter egos,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or even Charlotte Brontë’s eponymous Jane Eyre
and Bertha Rochester (“the madwoman in the attic”6), however, Miss Wake-
field the civilized lady and Esther the laughing hysteric cohabited all too
congenially within the same body. The two personas seem to be tag-teaming
the contradictions of traditional femininity in modernity, in which classi-
cal ideals of feminine decorum brush up against constant solicitations to
visceral excitement in the public sphere. Instead of inspiring a tragic tale
of their mutual self-destruction, Esther’s two bodies alternate rather comi-
cally, by means of their sheer incongruity. “Completely rational” one day
and “totally irresponsible” the next, Esther’s transgressions involved dis-
playing her sexual appetite in public space, laughing volubly (and “almost
uncann[ily]”), and making ill-advised decisions about romantic coupling
(from the conductor to the policeman to the fat passenger, “who was quite
old enough to deserve a better fate”).
Esther’s revolving-door personality evokes Breuer and Freud’s
1895 writings about their famous patient, Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim),
who inhabited “two entirely distinct states of consciousness which alter-
nated very frequently and without warning and which became more and
more differentiated in the course of the illness” (24). Anna O.’s symptoms
reflected the contradictions of her alternating mental states, as her “feeling[s]
always tended to slight exaggeration, alike of cheerfulness and gloom” (21).
(Georges Didi-Huberman has vibrantly elaborated on the fantastic extremes
of hysterical symptomology: “a fire of paradoxes [. . .] hysterics are in fact
[. . .] hot and cold, moist and dry, inert and convulsive, faint and full of life,
wearied and merry, fluid and heavy, stagnant and vibratory, fermented and
acidic, and so on” [74].) Unlike Esther’s kissing bug, which literalized her
repressed sexual appetite, Anna O.’s proliferating symptoms expressed a
severe fragmentation between mental ideation and bodily desire. Her other
key ailments included temporary paralysis, extreme lethargy and fatigue,
compulsive daydreaming, disturbances in vision, hallucinations, and debili-
tating headaches, among other passive, self-negating bodily afflictions. As
Breuer and Freud have defined conversion hysteria, “What was originally
an affective idea now no longer provokes the affect but only the abnormal
reflex” (284). If hysterics allegedly suffered from sexual repression (or
reminiscences, as Breuer and Freud famously claimed), Esther’s carnal
symptoms represent reflexes that appear all too normal: all too motivated
by the affects from which they apparently derive.
Anna O.’s conversion of mind into body portrays a very different
model of the hysteric’s negotiation between sexuality and language than
Esther Wakefield’s raging libido and hysterical laughter. Anna O. herself

coined “the talking cure” to describe Freud’s psychodynamic approach to
treating hysterical conversion. If hysterics grappled with prohibited desires
or unacceptable ideas by physically imprinting them on their bodies, then
the talking cure strove to eradicate these corporeal symptoms by putting
them back into language. Evoking the bereaved widows of ancient Greece
suffering from globus hystericus (a phantom lump in the throat), the hys-
teric physically excreted her symptoms through language. (One wonders if
Freud might have “talked” a patient of Hippocrates back into peak health by
guiding her to imagine her migratory uterus wandering back into place.)7
The hysteric provided for the very foundations of psychoanalysis:
the theory of hysterical repression laid the groundwork for Freud’s inter-
pretations of dreams, jokes, parapraxis (such as slips of the tongue), and
multifarious traces of the unconscious that inflect waking life.8 While Freud
(like Charcot) treated male hysterical patients in order to universalize his
theory of hysteria, women remain notoriously absent from the other uni-
versal models of the unconscious that Freud elaborates—most significantly,
for my purposes here, his account of laughter at jokes.
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), women’s
positions in relation to jokes are defined by the doubling of their absence and
negation. First, Freud tells us that female repression—itself the hallmark of
hysteria—makes it “impossible for women [. . .] to enjoy undisguised obscen-
ity,” thereby inhibiting the simple pleasures of obscene smut (120). Second, in
order for sexual prohibition to be laughed off through jokes—the ostensible
purpose of jokes being to circumvent such mental prohibitions—women
themselves must stay physically absent from the scene of laughter: “The
obstacle standing in the way is [. . .] nothing other than women’s incapacity
to tolerate undisguised sexuality” (120). As Freud asserts elsewhere in this
text, “A joke is thus a double-dealing rascal who serves two masters at once”:
conscious reason and unconscious irrationality, and, by proxy, the joke-teller
and the laughing observer (190). This laughing observer’s appreciation of
the joke thereby marks the recognition of that which remains, at face value,
repressed. Women’s sexual repression and hysterical suggestibility are
absolute preconditions for the joke’s unconscious communication.
According to Freudian psychoanalysis, laughter at jokes and
female hysteria represent mutually constitutive—and mutually exclusive—
formations of the unconscious. For this reason, women have to excrete
their hysterical bodily symptoms by talking about sexuality, as opposed
to doing so more expediently and pleasurably through motivated laughter.
Figure 1
“A Correct View of
the New Machine
for Winding Up the
Ladies, 1829.”
A cartoon that paro-
dies the absurd and
gruesome lengths of
female corseting.
Art and Picture Col-

lection, New York
Public Library.
Beyond psychoanalysis, in a wide variety of clinical and popular discourses,

women’s laughter was scrupulously and exhaustively regulated. Women
were instructed to efface all bodily evidence of their mirth, such as heaving
convulsions of the diaphragm, exposed teeth, or even augmented respira-
tion. One New York Herald advice columnist in 1898 described the paragon
female laugher: “She keeps her mouth closed, her lips well together [. . .] and
makes no noise at all” (“Here’s”). As Esther Wakefield’s outbursts of laugh-
ing and kissing indicate, there were rampant anxieties that the spasms of
laughter might become gateways to erotic ecstasy for women—not to mention
legitimate concerns about the physical dangers of laughing while wearing
tight-laced corsets.9 For example, the Victorian antilaughter polemicist
George Vasey argued that during laughter “the blood cannot be transmitted
freely and naturally through the lungs,” an effect vividly compounded by
the pressure of a garment intended to fashion the female waistline after the
neck of an hourglass (see fig. 1).
The physical constraints imposed on women’s laughter—from
etiquette manuals to misegolast philosophy to popular women’s apparel—
demanded endless rationalization.10 It was common wisdom that women
“should be thought to leave some touches of the joke undiscovered [. . .].
Ladies should be assured that there is nothing beyond worth knowing, or
that there is nothing in the joke, except its pretension to mystery” (“Philoso-
phy”). As another columnist opined, “To study your sweetheart’s silvery
cacchination, is to probe the recesses of her mind. Thus many unhappy
marriages can be avoided by ardent lovers” (“Now They Say”). Although the
connotations of these remarks are explicitly sexual, there is a deeper antago-
nism at play here between knowledge and gender, between what women can
know and the knowledge that might surface while joking. In other words,
these authors assume an implicit congruence between the physical damage

that laughter wreaked on women’s bodies and the epistemological crisis that
joking represented for women’s psyches.
All humor involves a spark of mental liberation in order to pro-
voke spontaneous laughter. This gendered train wreck between momentary
unconscious insight and escalating bodily eruption was no doubt at play for
Barbara Barr, the woman in Florence, New Jersey, who in 1907 allegedly
laughed for eight hours at a corny but sinister joke about dentistry. The joke
goes: “A man went to the dentist to have a tooth pulled. It was pulled and
it hurt. ‘Oh doctor,’ said the patient, ‘what a blessing it would be to be born
without teeth.’ ‘But my dear man,’ said the dentist, ‘we are, you know’ ”
(“Laughs Eight Hours”). The joke’s punch line hinges on a sharp reversal
between the dread of losing teeth and the startling recollection that they
once had already been lost. Freud, of course, associates the fear of dental lack
with an anxiety about castration (making teeth yet another token of the link
between constitutive violence and psychosexual difference).11 The reminder
that women, too, can symbolically lack the very thing that they simultane-
ously physically possess (e.g., “teeth” as vagina dentata, as opposed to the
phallic symbol of the penis) epitomizes the collision between psychosexual
and embodied forms of difference that often erupts with laughter.
Reportedly, it took two doctors six hours to end Miss Barbara
Barr’s “cacchinations”: they “threw water in her face, put keys down her
back, endeavored to make her angry by insults, but still she laughed.” More
than an uncontrollable automatic reaction, Miss Barr’s laughter retained
its comedic impetus throughout. She continued to repeat her favorite line of
the joke even while her family and physicians were violently assaulting her:
“ ‘I wish we were born without teeth,’ she would say, and then the laughter
would ring out again” (“Laughs Eight Hours”). Whether this tale is true or
exaggerated, it is very interesting that Barr always recalls the lead-in to the
punch line (“I wish we were born without teeth”), rather than the punch line
itself: the joke’s edentulous reversal, “We are, you know.” Eventually, her
doctors had to anesthetize her, and she awoke the next morning completely
unable to recall either the laughing attack or the joke itself (and fortunately
no one repeated it to her).
It is worth noting that this story about Barbara Barr’s mortal
brush with laughter is juxtaposed in the newspaper with an advertise-
ment for an herbal compound capable of “remedy[ing] all of woman’s ills,”
including “flagging energies, bearing-down sensations, nervousness, irregu-
larities or ‘the blues’ [. . .] [and] Exhaustion” (“Perfect”). Such symptoms
were frequently associated with “serious uterine trouble” in mass cultural

discourse. (One advertisement reassured its female readers: “Write to Mrs.
Pinkham. [. . .] You need not be afraid to tell her the things you could not
explain to your doctor—your letter is seen only by women” [“Nerves”].)
Lacking the outlet of laughter to discharge the nervous tensions of everyday
domesticity and modern life, women such as Barr were instead solicited
to ingest healing vegetable compounds in order to cure “the suffering that
comes from some derangement of the feminine organs” (“Perfect”). Implic-
itly, this organic derangement refers to female hysteria: the ad for “perfect
womanhood” (perhaps intentionally) evokes the ancient Greek theory of Hip-
pocrates that hysteria was organically motivated by a woman’s wandering
uterus.
Interestingly, despite her eight-hour, nearly fatal eruption of
hysterical laughter, Barr is at no point labeled a hysteric. In fact, the article
takes pains to separate the symptoms of Barr’s nervous eruption from the
woman herself, introducing Barr as a “member of the Baptist church choir
and one of the prettiest girls in the social set here.” In other words, Barr was
depicted as a polite, respectable lady, who became momentarily hysterical
from the impossible collision between her embodied disposition and her
bodily laughter. Due to the joke with an irresistibly Oedipal punch line about
dentistry, Barr was solicited to experience a form of laughter not really meant
for her body. If she had been a hysteric, she might have conjured automatic
symptoms to register her otherwise unrepresentable complaints through
more cryptic, less readily legible signs: blurred vision, paralysis, lethargy, or
perhaps a “tooth in her throat.” Rather, Barr’s near fatal laughter provided
her with an alternative to conversion hysteria.
Unlike other similarly mundane symptoms of hysteria—such
as yawning, sneezing, hiccupping, or coughing—laughter has a license
to become “hysterical” in a very colloquial, innocuous sense. This bears
further explanation. Several factors distinguish laughter from these other
automatic, nervous reactions. Laughter is: (1) typically provoked by an
identifiable trigger (such as a joke, a comic gag, or a surprising perception
of incongruity); (2) limited in its duration; and (3) easily, unremarkably
contagious in its effects. With notable exceptions,12 the contagious spread
of laughter is rarely a cause for alarm. Since women’s voluble, embodied
laughter was already a severe source of social disturbance and obsessive
regulation, the very idea of women’s hysterical laughter provoked a crisis of
definition. Unlike the colloquialism “hysterical laughter”—such as “laughing
hysterically” at a funny play with a proportionate impetus for an ephemeral
duration and in the company of a group—Barr’s laughter was more than

hysterical: it was borderline hysteric. Her laughter was singular, exces-
sively appreciative, and therefore noncontagious, as well as potentially fatal
in its protracted duration. (It is likely that she would have laughed herself
to death had she not been given anesthesia.) Between a figure of speech
and a clinical condition, women’s hysterical laughter was made to mark
the line between everyday life and sudden, traumatic death. In doing so, it
represented a flotation device, a salve, for preserving traditional norms of
femininity against the unruly fun, nervous shock, and enervating ruptures
characteristic of modern life.
Fatal Lexis Cacchinitis and the History of Death from Joy
Sometimes referred to as the “perils of feminine cacchination”

but more commonly just as “women’s death from laughter,” “fatal lexis cac-
chinitis” (“the lethal lexicon of laughter”—or “deadly diction,” if you like)
afflicted hundreds of women from the mid-nineteenth through early twen-
tieth centuries. The technical causes of death, when specified, were diverse
and somewhat less mystifying; they ranged from heart attacks to ruptured
blood vessels in the brain to sheer physical exhaustion. Yet the incitements
to women’s uncontrollable mirth were unmistakably comedic. The indirect
causes of death by laughter included mundane slapstick incidents in the
home (such as playing the organ out of tune or witnessing a sibling’s intoxica-
tion), dentistry-themed puns, circus spectatorship, competitive party games,
bumpy mishaps on the streetcar, farcical transgressions in food preparation,
and, of course, mother-in-law jokes. The sources reporting these sometimes
apocryphal and no doubt exaggerated tales themselves ranged from social
etiquette manuals to local gossip columns to obituary reports and human
interest stories in legitimate national newspapers.
I read this proliferation of discourse around bodily laughter and
female mortality as a regulatory technique. Death from laughter epitomized
the disciplinary warning that women were too fragile and vulnerable to
experience exuberant joy. Commentators claimed that “loud laughing is
dangerous to women [. . .] as gentleness is their especial charm, they should
laugh softly, lowly, musically” (“Philosophy”). Even unmelodious auditory
experiences could stir up women’s suppressed, raucous laughter. For exam-
ple, Miss Josie Leisslie, a woman of twenty from Flint, Michigan, laughed
herself to death in her home while playing the organ out of tune: “[S]he fell
over backward in her chair in a fit of laughter, provoked by a discord in the
music” (“Death from Laughter,” Daily Picayune). Echoing the cacophonous

organ music that triggered her fatal jubilation, Leisslie apparently suffered
from lexis cacchinitis (“laughing lexicon”) not meant for her body. Doubling
down on the lexical displacement from musical to female organ, Leisslie’s
fatal laughter incited a conflagration. Her fall overturned an oil lamp, “which
set fire to the carpet, but [. . .] was soon extinguished, when it was found
that she was dead.” According to her obituary, the official cause of death was
heart disease. While the death itself was fairly rapid—incited by allegedly
unnatural laughter at unmusical organ playing—the corpse was displayed
for a considerable duration. Leisslie’s laughing death outpaced the burning
and extinguishing of the carpet in her home; however, her corpse remained
relatively unmarked by the incineration, in an uncannily lifelike state, as
if “in a trance or sleep.” This eerie threshold between instantaneous death
from laughter and uncanny postmortem preservation (Leisslie’s corpse
was displayed for three days due to its “life-like appearance”) is indicative
of a broader fascination with what it might mean for women actually to die
laughing.
These gendered perils of death from laughter marked signifi-
cant departures from earlier premodern fascinations with the possibility
of “death from joy.” For example, the ancient Greek Stoic Chrysippus of Soli
famously laughed himself to death in 206 bce at the sight of his donkey eating
his own figs and drinking his wine; Chilon of Sparta died of joy in 550 bce
upon seeing his son triumph in the Olympics; and the Greek painter Zeuxis
died of sexist, derisive laughter when commissioned to paint a portrait of
Aphrodite modeled after a homely woman. Death from joy or “gay death”
was a prominent theme of antiquity and of medieval folk culture, one that
Mikhail Bakhtin discusses extensively as a staple of the carnivalesque, the
comic-grotesque systems of imagery that Renaissance writer François Rabe-
lais inherited from medieval folk culture. According to Bakhtin in Rabelais
and His World, “there are nine cases of death from joy in Rabelais’[s] list-
ing” (408). Bakhtin cites Rabelais’s description of the death of Chrysippus
and Master Janotus (who both laughed at the drunk donkey): “Their eyes
watered at the violent concussion of the cerebral substance which pressed
out these lachrymal humidities and brought them flowing out through the
optic nerves” (408). Such gay deaths were far cries from instances like the
death from laughter of Mrs. Ida Bolley, who “caus[ed] some jolly people
uneasiness” when her cacchination at an agriculture-themed joke incited
her “apoplexy—that is, rupture of the blood vessels in the brain [. . .] when
weakened blood vessel walls [. . .] bring about ossification or calcification
of the arteries [. . .] [making] them quite brittle” (“Death from Laughter,”

New York Tribune). While Chrysippus’s “lachrymal humidities” (Bakhtin
408) generously overflowed, Bolley’s arteries shattered like a piece of glass
or snapped like an overstressed rubber band.
In the same year that Leisslie died from laughter, George Vasey
issued the warning to Victorian female revelers, in his 1875 antilaughter
treatise The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling: “In the paroxysm of laugh-
ter [. . .] the blood cannot be transmitted freely and naturally through the
lungs. [. . .] If [this] passage [. . .] be impeded for more than a few seconds the
brain becomes congested, apoplexy ensues, and in very many cases ends
fatally” (40–41). The two most undesirable forms of laughter for women,
according to Vasey, included “the hearty laugh of the gentler sex” and “the
giggling laugh, excited by boisterous fun and nonsense” (100). Though
Vasey’s polemic against laughter relies on class differences above sexual
differences, women implicitly herald the disastrous consequences should
the suppression of laughter fail: Vasey’s message is that bourgeois society
should structure its mirthful decorum around the alleged mental and bodily
limits of “the gentler sex.” As Anca Parvulescu argues in Laughter: Notes on
a Passion, while “[t]he ‘civilizing of laughter’ does not lead to a prohibition
on all laughter [. . .] once one strips laughter of noise and grimace, what we
are left with can hardly be called a laugh” (58). Parvulescu associates repul-
sion toward laughter with the literalism of modern phobias about “the loss
of face”: the photographic idea that one’s true character radiates from the
face but threatens to be submerged by the spastic facial tics and gestures
associated with voluble laughter. As Parvulescu notes, “Laughter [was] a
threat to the expressive order of the smile” (58). The war on laughter often
made recourse to typologies of expression—not just physiognomies of facial
contortions and the proper boundaries of the smile13 but phonetic accounts
of what the different intonations of female laughter might signify (see fig. 2).
For example, one columnist asked: “What is the sound [of laugh-
ter]? Can you put it down on paper, in written syllables?” The author con-
cludes that “we all laugh differently. It is hardly possible to find two persons
who laugh exactly the same kind of laugh, either to sound or expression”
(“What Happens”). Popular commentators relished invoking unnamed
“French specialist[s] of the throat, voice, and eyes” who posited that “every
woman unconsciously betrays her character every time she laughs, and
that she laughs in one of the vowel sounds” (“Now They Say”). For example,
women who laugh in “E” are characterized as phlegmatic, rigid, humorless,
and potentially melancholic; women who laugh in “I” betray their timid
Figure 2
“Are You Afraid to
Laugh?”
Goodall’s Dental
Institute advertise-
ment, displaying the
glamorous effects of
proper dentistry as a
corrective to the pro-
hibition on female
laughter (1912).
The Wellcome
Library, London.
shyness, naïveté, and foolish idiocy; and women who laugh in “O” indicate
their brutal, callous duplicity: “Never a villain in a melodrama but who
mocked this victim with a ‘Ho-ho!’ ” (“Now They Say”). Since the vowel into-
nations of even innocuous female laughter could reveal “the very window
of [her] soul” (“Now They Say”), while toothy smiles at least exposed bad
dental hygiene, the suppression of voluble laughter offered women further
protection from being pigeonholed as potentially phlegmatic, idiotic, or
villainous.
Pittsburgh Gazette Times writer “Loretta” (who in her regular
advice column, “Loretta’s Looking Glass,” frequently held her “looking
glass” up to life) here uses acoustic metaphors to hold her glass up to “the
Girl That Squeals.” Loretta describes this denigrated female laugher zoomor-
phically as “the female for howl,” advising all mirthful female readers: “You
think the noise you make is a laugh. [. . .] [But] it is [rather] a vocal explosion.
What makes you do it? It’s common and horrid. It’s unmusical and unfemi-
nine. [. . .] This squeak that [. . .] reach[es] its height of ear-splitting awful-
ness in the fully grown squeal [. . .] [renders you] a discordant curiosity”
(“Loretta’s”). Loretta warns her reader emphatically: “the squealing girl
is sure to come to some bad end.” To escape this consequence, women
were instructed to efface all signs of bodily movement, acoustic volume, or
visceral enjoyment from their laughter. The ideal form of female laughter
might strongly resemble the countenance of Miss Josie Leisslie, postmortem:
a “corpse having a life-like appearance [. . .] as in a trance or sleep.” Female

hysteria represented the reverse side of this systematic suppression of female
laughter: its vocal, kinetic, and carnal negation. Whereas genuine laughter
erupted spontaneously and involuntarily in response to a humorous trigger,
this pathway—between a charged or evocative impetus and its automatic
affective response—was effectively severed for the women who obeyed the
gendered social strictures imposed on laughter. In contrast to the woman
whose laughter was lethalized (or at best stigmatized), the laughter of the
female hysteric was, instead, medicalized. All female hysterics were, to an
extent, rendered laughing hysterics.
Women’s Hysterical Laughter vs.

Female Laughing Hysteria
While women’s convulsive, contagious, and sometimes termi-

nal laughter was frequently invoked as “hysterical,” this signifier always
remained somewhat hyperbolic. Women’s hysterical laughter was system-
atically bracketed from the clinical laughter (and other visceral outbursts)
associated with female hysteria. This female hysteria, as we know, was
extensively studied, administered, and theorized at the time. From Charcot
to Alfred Binet and Charles Féré to Breuer and Freud, new fields of neurology
and psychology exploded through the public theater of women’s bodily symp-
toms. At the Salpêtrière, Charcot would famously induce fantastic seizures
and epileptic fits in his female patients (some of whom, such as Augustine
and Blanche Wittman, became clinical celebrities) before live audiences of
male students and medical peers. During the second phase of the hysteric’s
four-part attack, “the period of contortions and grands mouvements” that
Charcot also referred to as clownisme, the patient would assume unbeliev-
able acrobatic positions—sometimes culminating in the arc de cercle, in
which “the patient bent backwards into a seemingly impossible contortion,
with only the back of the head and heels still touching the ground” (Scull
115) (see fig. 3). Like a professional contortionist in a circus, or a doctored
actor in a trick film, the hysteric’s bodily performance oscillated between
awe-inspiring feats and underlying assurances of their reversibility.
The symptomology of death from laughter often sounded no less
incredible than Charcot’s hysterics’ epileptic clownism. For example, when
Mrs. Louise A. Speetzen laughed herself to death at a dinner party, she told
her husband: “I feel a sharp ticking pain in my side. [. . .] It feels as though a
knife had been run into me” (“Death from Excessive”). A doctor discovered
Figure 3
“Clownism” from
Clinical Studies in
Hystero-Epilepsy or
Grand Hysteria by
Paul Richer (1881).
The Wellcome
Library, London.
that Speetzen “was bleeding to death as a result of a ruptured blood ves-

sel in the abdomen.” After an emergency operation, she died the next day.
There is a striking correlation between Speetzen’s uncontrollable laughter
and her malfunctioning internal organs (somewhere in the neighborhood of
the uterus): the ruptured blood vessel in the abdomen was fatally triggered
by her excessive mirth. Charcot himself argued that hysterics experience
“functional lesions in the brain” (278) (though they leave no organic trace),14
thus emphasizing the hysteric’s bodily mimicry of organic physiological

conditions. While Speetzen’s laughter may have been figuratively hysterical,
evidently, her violent, sexually suggestive, internal stabbing pain turned
out to be very real.
Charcot’s assistant, Joseph Babinski, emphasized the imaginary
nature of hysterics’ palpably visceral symptoms: “A phenomenon is hysteri-
cal [. . .] when it can be produced through suggestion and cured through
persuasion” (qtd. in Janet 325)—unlike Speetzen’s laughter-induced, stabbing
pain. As M. M. Mathieu and Roux put it (in a paper on hysterical vomiting),
“What characterizes hystericals [. . .] is less the fact of accepting some idea
or other than the action exercised by this idea on their stomachs and intes-
tines” (qtd. in Janet 325). In other words, hysteria designated the corporeal
representation of a mental or emotional conflict. Like the psychosomatic
causes from which these symptoms derived, the ravaging physical effects of a
hysterical attack were repeatedly characterized as impermanent, reversible,
and largely imaginary.
If a flight of mirth alone could physically destroy a woman like
Speetzen, the hysterical woman’s body could endure unimaginable degrees
of physical and emotional trauma. You could hypnotize her and mold her
limbs like those of a puppet; induce her to intend to commit murder without
her realizing that a paper knife had taken the place of her deadly weapon;
or provoke a seizure whereby her usually fragile or lethargic limbs would
acquire a fantastic degree of animation and flexibility. During an induced
attack at Charcot’s clinic, “[b]ody and limbs [. . .] maintain any position in
which they are placed [. . .]. If the arm is raised to a right angle with the
body, it remains so; if the leg is placed in a similar position, it does not fall.
The patient may be moulded at will like a waxen figure, into any pose one
pleases, and the position will be retained” (Hustvedt 64). Whereas the mild
convulsions of the diaphragm that occur during laughter were too intense
for nonhysterical women, apparently no degree of physical convulsion could
inflict lasting damage upon the body of the female hysteric.
Feminist Theories of Laughter, Language, and Hysteria
It is a truism of psychoanalytic feminist theory that hysterical

symptoms provide outlets for the expression of repressed female desires. In
her contribution to Hysteria beyond Freud, edited by Sander Gilman, Elaine
Showalter succinctly describes hysteria as a “feminine protolanguage, com-
municating through the body messages that cannot be verbalized” (286).
Without a proper voice in the symbolic—or without the means to articulate

her perspective in language through rational modes of communication—the
hysteric physically conjures text from her own body. She represents that
which escapes rational knowledge, expressing herself instead through physi-
cal symptoms—which range from double consciousness, blurred vision, and
artificial somnambulism to motor agitations, inimitable speech tics, and
voluble fits of laughter and barking.
This is precisely why, I argue, laughter has so often slipped
through the cracks as a noteworthy symptom in research and writings on
hysteria. There is profound structural tension between hysteria and laugh-
ter, something at once too obviously similar and fundamentally dissimilar
about laughter and hysteria. Their uncanny resemblances include heaving
bodily convulsions, incomprehensible utterances, involuntary gestural
automatisms, and the disjunctive coordination between body and mind,
physical expression and mental ideation. Derived from the Greek hystera,
meaning uterus (though the illness dates back to ancient Egypt), hysteria
was evacuated of its linguistic basis in female anatomy by modern clini-
cal neurology. To invoke Didi-Huberman, hysteria “was aporia made into
a symptom. It was the symptom, to put it crudely, of being a woman” (68).
Boisterous or uproarious laughter, in contrast, was defensively masculinized
because women’s vulnerability to nervous pathology always threatened to
literalize the colloquialism of hysterical laughter.
In feminist psychoanalytic and semiotic theories of language
and sexual difference (including Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément’s
The Newly Born Woman, Juliet Mitchell’s Mad Men and Medusas, Show-
alter’s Hystories, and Karen Beckman’s Vanishing Women), hysteria has
been championed and debated as an antipatriarchal discourse of female
desire and feminist writing. If hysteria liberates women from the symbolic
constraints of phallocentric language, jouissance has provided a big tent
for theorizing forms of feminine pleasure that cross a certain threshold of
enjoyment, containment, or legibility (though it is beyond the scope of this
article to elucidate the relationship between hysterical laughter and femi-
nine jouissance). Just as feminist psychoanalytic theorists have sought to
reclaim hysteria, feminist comedy theorists have celebrated the colloquial-
ism of hysteria when it invests women’s laughter. These accounts of women’s
hysterical laughter typically exploit the signifier hysteria for its suggestive
plenitude (playing on the affinities between excessive laughter and female
insanity) but draw primarily on nonpsychoanalytic theories, principally
Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque. As a result, these feminist approaches
(exemplified by Alison Kibler’s Rank Ladies, Kathleen Rowe’s The Unruly

Woman, and Mary Russo’s Female Grotesque) tend to occlude substantive
engagement with theories of hysteria. This is primarily a methodological
constraint. The convulsive, laughing excess of carnivalesque collectivity
signifies very differently from the unconscious laughter of the psychosexual
subject, which mediates between mental ideation and bodily sensation
rather than between dying and regenerating social bodies (as carnivalesque
laughter does). In other words, the gendered “hysterical laughter” explored
in these feminist texts, whether politically oppositional or not, remains
figurative and euphemistic.
Cixous’s “Laugh of the Medusa” represents one of the most
pointed attempts to align women’s hysterical laughter with female hysteria
as an alternative to phallocentric language and desire. Cixous describes
the feminist jouissance of Medusan laughter: “[T]hat which is ours breaks
loose from us without our fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles,
are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend
ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts,
our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking” (878). However,
the trap of a laughter that is “not afraid of lacking,” as Cixous’s critics
have remarked, returns Medusan laughter to the problem of the hysteric’s
symbolic illegibility.
The key issue at stake here concerns the question of whether
hysterical protest passes into symbolic inscription. In response to Cix-
ous’s celebration of Freud’s patient Dora as a “resistant heroine” and “core
example of the protesting force of women” (Cixous and Benmussa), Clément
accuses Cixous of fetishizing Dora. The language of Cixous’s retort to Clé-
ment, appropriately, emphasizes the sheer pageantry of Dora’s symbolic
resistance: “I don’t give a damn about Dora; I don’t fetishize her. She is the
name of a certain disturbing force, which makes the little circus not work
anymore” (Gallup, “Keys” 289). The central problem debated here, regarding
the protesting force of the hysteric’s discourse, concerns the ease with which
hysterical language can be negated, rendered illegible and incomprehensible
without clinical transcription. As Jane Gallop has aptly (and humorously)
paraphrased Clément, Dora’s exemplary outbursts, in fact, “burst nothing.
According to Clément, ‘Raising a ruckus, causing a crisis, perturbing famil-
ial relations, that is re-closable’ ” (204). By reclosable, Clément means that
Dora’s protesting, hysterical language does not break through the closed
circuits of bourgeois familial desire—nor does it disturb the mastery of
Freud’s narrative analysis. If ordinary women were denied access to the
colloquialism of hysterical laughter, then, clinical hysterics like Dora had

quite the opposite problem: their laughing language was rendered entirely
a figure of speech. The laughing hysteric could never say what she meant
because her meaning would not stick either way.
Like Charcot’s star hysterics, who could experience almost any-
thing with their bodies, the talking hysteric could potentially conjure any-
thing from her unconscious. This is precisely the point: the hysteric knew
too much. Ever the foil, it was the laughing woman who would have died to
know what her hysterical counterpart registered bodily—that is, if she did not
die from knowing it. In psychoanalytic theory, as in mass culture, laughter
and hysteria emerged as rhetorically bracketed but mutually constitutive
discourses. The laughing female hysteric was paraded as a funhouse mirror
doppelgänger of the hysterically laughing woman.
Hysteria at the Limits of Laughter:

Mimicry, Automatism, Desire
As I have argued, women who embodied and upheld traditional

ideals of femininity were effectively dying of laughter, which represented a
limit case for what these women could effectively understand or experience.
Against the rise of modern entertainment culture, which provoked uproari-
ous laughter at every turn (from the variety show to the amusement park),
female hysteria provided an alternative to the high-risk physics of female
jubilation in modernity.
The leading clinical theorists of modern hysteria, despite their
significant methodological and terminological differences, agreed that
hysterics suffer under the burden not just of nervous agitation but of mul-
tiple selves. Whether describing the problem as one of repression (Freud
and Breuer), hypnotic suggestibility (Charcot), or automatism (Janet), each
argued that the hysteric’s symptoms parlay complex or traumatic emotional
experiences into a language of bodily mimicry. In other words, the hysteric
adopts somatic symptoms of organic causes and adapts them into mimetic
symptoms of unknowable origins. In contrast, philosophers and essayists
writing about laughter during the heyday of hysteria (such as Henri Berg-
son, Charles Baudelaire, and Agnes Repplier) tend to typify laughter not as
a deferred manifestation, but as an immediate, involuntary reaction to the
appearance of absurdly conflicting, mutually exclusive personalities, desires,
and realities. (Recent scholars of humor have emphasized the incongruity
theory—which designates the perception of something incongruous—as
the most important philosophy of humor and laughter in modernity.) To

illustrate the complex differences between these formations of humor and
hysteria: the laugher would laugh at the hysteric automatically, while the
hysteric’s reactive laughter would erupt off-cue, perhaps several months
later, and potentially in the form of phantom paralysis, somnambulism, or
uncontrollable twitching.
Despite the deeply suggestive parallels and extensive, overlap-
ping terminologies shared among philosophies of laughter and theorizations
of hysteria, I am arguing that each term, laughter and hysteria, represents
a glaring blind spot in the other’s terrain. For example, in Janet’s compre-
hensive study of the major symptoms of hysteria, there is only one mention
of hysterical laughter, which appears briefly sandwiched between hysterical
hiccupping and medieval epidemics of hysterical barking.15 Janet mentions a
story about “a girl of bad morals” given chloroform during an illicit surgical
operation (presumably an abortion). The doctors “had kept joking her and
making her laugh. [. . .] [T]his laughter was transformed into an independent
automatic phenomenon, and persisted as a tic” (261). Beyond this example,
which suggests an implicit correlation between woman’s hysterical laugh-
ter and female sexual immorality, Janet brackets laughter as a less useful
model for theorizing hysteria: “It is probably a phenomenon of derivation
of the nervous strength very difficult to account for” (261–62). Within the
broader fields of neurology, physiology, and biology, nineteenth-century
writings on laughter (elaborated by Herbert Spencer, Léon Dumont, Charles
Darwin, and Ewald Hecker) emphasized not the reaction to incongruity, but
the importance of laughter as a mechanism for releasing pent-up nervous
energy. Since, in the case of laughter, the pathways between conscious emo-
tions, mental ideas, and physical gestures are already so murky, it is not
entirely surprising that Janet would refrain from filtering his already very
complicated account of hysteria through them.
Janet, like Freud and Breuer, focused on the hysteric’s traumatic
severing of the associations between habitual memory and affective aware-
ness, between physical gesture, mental ideation, and emotional sensation.
He defines this complex structure as an “automatism,” which, under the
burden of traumatic stress, becomes delinked and disassociated among its
constitutive thoughts, actions, and desires. Janet distinguishes hysterical
phenomena from that which one wills and believes, or “simply what one
desires, what pleases one momentarily, what is strongly presented to one’s
mind by an outer influence” (xix). Hysterical phenomena, unlike will and
beliefs, “are immediate and irreflective. They still bring about acts, and even
acts that are sometimes more violent, and more tenacious, but they do not in
the same manner involve the whole personality and do not bear with them,
like reflective beliefs, the feeling of reality.” Rather, the hysteric’s immediate
and irreflective desires and beliefs “are often accompanied with feelings of
automatism, depersonalization and irreality” (xix). The two fundamental
conditions of hysteria, according to Janet, involve a strengthening of automa-
tism and weakening of its immediate, personal evocation: “[T]he preservation
of automatism and the diminution of personal synthesis; this is the hysteri-
cal state” (289). Automatisms are thus charged with “subconscious” (Janet’s
preferred term) significance and thereby issue from an extremely complex
interplay between emotional memories and everyday habits and gestures.
Automatism represents the glue between conscious will and everything that
exceeds it, glue that could easily erode at its vulnerable points.
Automatism, of course, also marks a central concept in contem-
poraneous theories of laughter, especially Henri Bergson’s widely cited 1903
text, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, which was published
well after Janet had developed the concept of automatism through his stud-
ies of hysterical suggestibility and hypnosis. In a strange inversion of Janet,
Bergson associates automatism foremost with the absentminded, rigid, and
unpliable comical behaviors that provoke corrective laughter. He asserts:
“It is really a kind of automatism that makes us laugh—an automatism, as
we have already remarked, closely akin to mere absentmindedness. To
realize this more fully, it need only be noted that a comic character is gen-
erally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comic person is
unconscious” (16). By unconscious, Bergson means oblivious and automatic
in one’s everyday behaviors—such as a man who walks into a glass door—not
one whose involuntary gestures somaticize repressed emotional conflicts
and overwhelming mental burdens. As Rae Beth Gordon notes, “Nowhere
in this essay does Bergson refer to the psychiatric definition of the term
[automatism], yet he uses it to mean unconscious or involuntary acts as well
as to underline the automaton-like character of mechanical gesture” (16).
Unlike Bergson’s notion of automatism as a mechanical tic or a stilted rei-
fication of habit (and therefore fodder for laughter), hysterical automatisms
stem from haunting ruptures between memory and experience.
Breuer explicitly attempts to differentiate the somatic symptoms
of hysteria from the idiogenic causes of nervous laughter. In his Studies
on Hysteria with Freud (the only coauthored work in which Freud’s name
appears second), Breuer emphasizes the hysterical breakage between bodily
symptoms and the ideas from which they derive: “[A]ll of us always know
what the idea is which makes us laugh or cry or blush, even though we have
not the slightest understanding of the nervous mechanism of these ideo-
genic phenomena. [. . .] But this is not the case with very many or indeed the
majority of hysterical symptoms. [. . .] Even intelligent [hysterical] patients
are unaware that their symptoms arise as the result of an idea and regard
them as physical phenomena on their own account” (220). In other words,
according to Breuer, nervous laughter must always have a cause—a comedic
incitement—whose momentary humorous comprehension dovetails with
the instantaneous eruption and ephemeral passage of laughter. In contrast,
hysterics typically repress the anecdotal and emotional triggers associated
with their somatic symptoms. At least this is Breuer’s argument: hysterical
symptoms “emerge as purely somatic phenomena, apparently without physi-
cal roots” (208). (Again, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in
which Freud comprehensively theorizes the relationship between comedic
laughter and unconscious repression, he doubles down on Breuer’s dis-
tinction between laughter and hysteria by positing the joke’s “condition of
intelligibility,” that is, its need for affirmation by a nonhysteric, laughing
spectator.)
I am arguing here that death from laughter represents a crisis
of identification between comical and hysterical forms of automatism,
which rarely intersected in philosophical and psychological writings on
laughter and hysteria. Indeed, it is really remarkable how little scholarship
exists attempting to theorize the precise relationship between laughter and
hysteria. No doubt this is due to the irresistible slippage between laughter
and hysteria, which, again, stems from the apparent excess of similarities
between these two entities: the writhing convulsions, the recession of con-
scious attention, and the complex mediation between mental idea and its
corporeal sensation.
Since women were officially denied such forms of pleasurable
release, their laughter precipitated an immediate conflict between prohib-
ited desire and automatic reaction. Like comic objects, the situations that
incited women to uncontrollable laughter tended to be idiosyncratic and
accidental: Sue Zentmyer laughed too “heartily” at the “herdsman who had
been upset by the cow he was milking” (“Laughed Herself Dumb”); Mary
Trelkald “died still laughing” at her tremendous surprise at trumping her
opponent’s high card in a bridge game (“Won”); Mrs. Joshua Walker laughed
herself to death at the sight of her husband accidentally salting the pork with
granulated sugar (“Laughed Herself to Death,” Providence Journal). As one
Herald commentator warned readers, “When laughter is very violent, the
entire body takes part in it. [. . .] The feet stamp on the floor, while the hands
are pressed on the loin to moderate the painful spasm. Thus we say on occa-
sion that a person ‘writhes’ with laughter.” Therefore, “a lady particularly,
however much she may be amused, does not permit herself to go through
such performances” (“What Happens”). After all, it might kill her. In 1901 in
Newark, New Jersey, a woman laughing heartily entered Westwood’s Bakery,
imploring: “Please give me a glass of water, I’m most dead from laughing.”
According to one local report, “Before the water could be handed to her she
fell to the floor a corpse” (“This Woman”). In opposition to Freud’s notion
of gallows humor, whereby a hangman escapes the trauma of certain death
through momentary laughter (a mirthful reprieve), the joke (albeit a grisly
one) of Mrs. Ann Lake’s death at the bakery was deferred until the moment
when “she fell to the floor a corpse.” The punch line: she really was “most
dead from laughing.”
If laughter somehow failed to kill women, the pressure of its
“strengthened expiratory movement” (or its “excess of the expirations over
the inspirations”), according to both popular commentators and clinical
physicians, would be forced to seek other outlets (Ribot 354). For example,
a pious woman attending her local church service “laughed for 3 days and
nights” as an escalating response to her hopeless attempts to suppress her
own amusement. “Her sense of propriety was shocked and she felt deeply
mortified when a broad smile spread over her features in spite of every effort
to suppress it. [. . .] Every effort she made to control herself only seemed to
increase her desire to laugh long and loud” (“What Happens”). According to
this sensationalist retelling, which posits black magic by a gypsy crone as
one possible cause of the girl’s uncontrollable laughter, Sallie Hollins finally
escaped her laughing death sentence, fittingly enough, through a near-death
experience, when her canoe capsized and she nearly drowned. “The first
words that she uttered after getting the water out of her lungs were: ‘I am
cured; I could not laugh now if I were to try.’ ” After some time passed, and
all were reassured that she had fully recovered from her affliction: “[M]ore
is the mystery, Miss Sallie says that she feels no desire whatever to laugh,
and that she would not even smile for the deed to a gold mine.” Bracketing
the peculiarity of Sallie’s total loss of any remaining sense of humor (or
even capacity for happiness, as per her inability to imagine smiling upon
inheriting “the deed to a gold mine”), the literalism of her cure bears further
interpretation. Like Esther Wakefield’s symptomatic pun on “the kissing
bug,” Sallie’s remedy seems to mimic its own fantastic symptomology. If
Mrs. Ann Lake asked for water as a reprieve from her death from laughter,
Sallie Hollins experienced drowning asphyxiation (her lungs filling with
water) as a permanent corrective to fatal cacchination: the prolonged, violent
interruption of normal respiration through the lungs. While women were
denied access to laughter as a form of physical and emotional release, the
cures for death from laughter themselves were oddly hysterical. (Throwing
water in the face of a woman rhetorically “drowning” from laughter was
not an uncommon treatment.)
Heaving convulsions evocative of women’s mirthless, joyless
laughter on the brink of death, similarly, represented frustrating objects of
study for researchers of female hysteria. This is precisely Janet’s critique of
his former mentor, Charcot: hysterical convulsions would not represent a
fruitful starting point for the study of hysteria, because it is too difficult to
decipher when they emanate from repressed memories and when simply
from habitual physical gestures. Janet argues: “The convulsions have all
sorts of meaning; sometimes they are in connection with sensations or ideas
and very complicated states of consciousness; sometimes they are nearly
deprived of consciousness; in certain cases they are linked to habits and
grimaces” (22–23).16 Also in his Major Symptoms of Hysteria, Janet recounts
the remarkable case of a patient, a twenty-year-old woman named Irène, who
witnessed her mother slowly dying of consumption over the course of two
months. “The girl struggled hopelessly against the impossible. She watched
her mother during sixty nights, working at her sewing-machine to earn a few
pennies to sustain their lives” (29–30). After her mother’s prolonged fatality,
Irène suffered from somnambulism: extended trances during which she
would impeccably reenact the events surrounding her mother’s death. Irène
“tried to revive the corpse, to call the breath back again; then, as she put
the limbs upright, the body fell to the floor [. . .]. You may picture to yourself
all that frightful scene” (30). While Sallie vanquished her own laughter by
escalating its respiratory disruption (filling her lungs with water), Irène’s
hysteria caused her, at length, to reincarnate the very instant of the loss of
life, “to call the breath back again.” Death, again, often marked the line
between women’s laughter and female hysteria. If a woman could not cure
herself of her funny bone—probably putting her life on the line along with
her sense of humor—then her laughter would have nowhere else to go in the
moment of eruption. It would endure through a mise-en-abyme of tangible
and intangible provocations, rebounding between the direct impetus for
laughter and the broken pathway of latent associations behind it.
Death from Laughter in the Public Sphere:

Cinema’s Visual Cure
Female revelers in the public sphere were dropping like flies:

attending the local theater, having a tooth pulled at the dentist, shopping for
hats, waiting for the streetcar, or even reciting psalms at church could all
become gateways to the nervous, excessive, and potentially fatal laughter of
lexis cacchinitis. As I have argued, both death from laughter and laughing
hysteria stemmed from broader social anxieties about the automatic and
mimetic expressions of inappropriate desire—especially as these symptoms
seized and possessed women’s bodies. In this final section, I will explore
the rise of motion pictures—an entertainment form, a social institution, and
a technological apparatus devoted to the visual representation of physical
automatisms—as a salve to the gendered crosscurrents between female hys-
teria and hysterical laughter. In other words, the motion picture emerged
as a visual cure for both female hysteria and women’s hysterical laughter.
While many feminist film scholars have written about the public sphere
politics of women’s spectatorship and gendered modernity,17 no study yet
has theorized early cinema in relation to female hysteria and women’s
laughter. I argue here that early cinema (both its visual representation and
its spectator experience) was deeply marked by the collision between these
two entities: the public sphere politics of women’s embodied laughter and
the fantastic physiognomy of female hysteria.
Cinema was exceptional in this regard. Most every other modern
entertainment forum—including the circus, the amusement park, and the
variety show (although films were themselves displayed in and inflected
by these spaces)—did not afford women such relief from the overwhelming
burdens of mimicry, automatism, and desire, that is, from the gendered train
wreck of hysteria’s secret intimacy with laughter. The live theater marked
an especially pernicious excitation for laughing women. For example, in
Pittsburgh, “a woman went [to the theater] to enjoy a comedy and furnished
a tragedy” when she inexplicably laughed herself to death in the middle of
a dramatic performance (“Woman”). A twenty-five-year-old woman died of
a heart attack after becoming convulsed with laughter during a play at the
Gilmore Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts: in “Death Notice: Convulsed
with Mirth a Moment before She Expired in Theater,” it was reported that
“the body of a stylishly dressed woman [. . .] [now] awaits identification in
the morgue.” In New Orleans, Mrs. Margaret Leathers “laughed so heart-
ily at the performance at a local theater that she became unconscious and
died [. . .]. [I]t is supposed that violent laughter brought on a [heart] attack”
(“Laughs Herself to Death,” Plain Dealer). Mrs. Charles S. Stuber, age thirty-
three, died “of acute indigestion [. . .] while laughing during a funny scene
at the opening performance of the season” at her local theater in Allentown,
Pennsylvania (“Laughs Herself to Death,” Trenton Evening Times). A funny
play was named as the cause of death for Mrs. George D. Baker of Derby,
Connecticut: “A well-known summer resident of New London laughed too
heartily while attending a play [. . .] and as a result died [. . .]. [The] physi-
cian said that Mrs. Baker was in good health until she attended the theater,
when she laughed so heartily as to cause weakness of the heart” (“Laughed
Herself to Death: Comedy”).
Beyond the theater, the public sphere teemed with overwhelm-
ing incitements to laughter. Georg Simmel has defined the “psychological
foundation, upon which metropolitan individuality is erected” as a high-
wire act between personal boundaries and collective excitations (12). This
instability and uncertainty between external triggers and internal pressures
encompassed “the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differ-
ences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of
violent stimuli” (12). Numerous incidents of women’s deaths from laughter
negotiated between contagious, collective joy and the idiosyncrasies of
individual memory and experience. Laughter in the public sphere could
go awry when the individual fell out of sync with the crowd—or when the
imperfect metaphor of contagious laughter became too visibly apparent.
For example, Freda Afilid’s laughter set her apart from the group chorus
while standing on a street corner waiting for the train with her friends. A
member of her party made a humorous remark that provoked an outburst of
laughter, when Afilid’s laughter “grew in volume until the woman became
hysterical” (Sandusky). The gap between her friends’ group merriment and
Afilid’s own excessive appreciation caused an escalation of symptoms, and
Afilid “laughed herself into the hospital.”
Although the public sphere teemed with such gendered laughing
death traps, the motion picture theater represented an exceptional space in
which women could laugh freely and volubly without fear of laughter’s fatal
escalation. Between hysterical laughter and laughing hysteria, the female
laughing spectator of early cinema had a radically visceral and complexly
ambivalent relationship with her onscreen counterimage. In other words,
the rigorously opposed discourses of women’s laughter and female hysteria
collided headlong in the iconography of early cinema.18
The most striking thing about women’s laughter at early film

screenings was the relative absence of tension attributed to it by reviewers
and commentators. To laugh along with the text was itself a feature of the
show. Even to laugh against the grain of the film was encompassed by the
moving picture’s rapid pacing and paradoxical temporality. Trade magazines
advertised films’ democratic appeals to humor, interpellating all potential,
ticket-purchasing audiences as laughing spectators. The examples of this
mandate to laughter are legion. The Moving Picture World claimed: “Anyone
who cannot roar with laughter [at Mr. Tibbs’ Cinderella] should see a physi-
cian at once”—which further associates the suppression of laughter with the
onset of psychological illness (“Manufacturers’ ”).
Like other mass entertainment venues, such as the live theater,
the amusement park, or the circus, moving pictures democratized laughter
in the public sphere, temporarily licensing such disruptive outbursts of
audible, visceral, female pleasure. In this vein, Lauren Rabinovitz produc-
tively compares early cinema to amusement parks, emphasizing the “nov-
elty of their technological bases” that emblematized “a new public culture
dedicated to the consumption of enjoyment” (2). These parallel “electric
dreamlands” were dedicated to the “pleasure[s] of mechanical motion” (141).
I would further argue that moving pictures legitimized women’s uproarious
laughter more emphatically and consistently than other spaces of leisure
and amusement (including the amusement park). Moving pictures needed
women’s laughter in order to validate their own existential contradictions:
the fraught coordination between physical inscriptions of past events and
their lifelike reanimation in the present; the rapid, continuous projection
of discrete, static photograms; and the physical solicitation of living bodies
by derealized moving images.
The archival examples abound. For instance, during a crowded
screening of Alkali Ike’s Pants at the Lyda Theater in Chicago, “one old lady”
set herself apart from the crowd of over 3,200 laughing spectators: unable to
“control her laughter [she] went home, still giving voice to her merriment at
the farcical scenes” (“Chicago”). Another female spectator “laughed herself
red in the face at the antics and peculiar situations in the comedy-drama
[. . .] Some Bride” (“Laughed Herself Red”). According to the Kalamazoo
Gazette, Mrs. Ethel M. Strouse successfully sued her husband for divorce on
the grounds of extreme cruelty and nonsupport, citing as a key example that
he would not let her laugh out loud at the movies (“Wouldn’t”). Rabinovitz
cites an unpublished conference paper by Jennifer Bean in which Bean sug-
gestively compares the slapstick comedian’s “travesty of order” onscreen to
the “loss of bodily integrity available to the viewer”: “[O]ne who succumbs
first to a ‘titter,’ devolves toward a ‘yowl,’ cranks up for a stimulating ‘bel-
lylaugh,’ and races on to laughter’s apotheosis: the ‘boffo’ or ‘the laugh that
kills’ ” (qtd. in Rabinovitz 140). Bean locates these “metaphors of assault”
between the rhetorical death of the individual body and its logical extension
in “the decimated social body” (“Early”). Film industry press discourse often
reveled in hyperbolizing the violent, catastrophic, and even lethal bodily
effects of watching raucous slapstick comedies.19
More than just legitimizing loud laughter for women, films were
repeatedly championed as potential cures for insanity. In 1911, the u.s. gov-
ernment invested $125,000 to build a motion picture theater for inmates at
the St. Elizabeth’s Insane Asylum outside Washington, dc. “The theater is to
be devoted to the display of moving pictures which alienists declare to be a
great aid in curing insanity” (“Moving”). Advocates for the use of cinema in
asylums emphasized the similarities between film illusions and delusional
hallucinations—as if one somehow mitigated the other. When a theater was
installed in a Chicago asylum in 1904, “the performance on the canvas drew
the attention and interest of 400 patients [. . .]. The seemingly realistic manner
in which the figures appeared and disappeared within the rim of light opened
a new channel for their thought and led them away from the particular hal-
lucination or delusion” (“Biograph”). While overexposure to motion pictures
was thought to induce hysterical or neurasthenic symptoms in chronic film
spectators (especially children),20 weekly screenings in asylums could poten-
tially stir patients, calming nervous or excitable subjects and stimulating
melancholic depressives to let go of their fixations on imaginary wrongs.
Filmmakers, too, latched onto this congruence between the
psychology of hysteria and the iconography of cinema, thematizing the
triangulation between body, mind, and screen as a productive premise for
storytelling narration.21 Léonce Perret’s The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador
(France, 1912) represents perhaps the most remarkable example of a meta-
film about the belief in cinema as a visual cure for female hysteria. The
film depicts the plight of an orphaned heiress, Suzanne, whose insolvent
cousin will receive her inheritance in the event that she goes insane before
her eighteenth birthday. He therefore schemes for Suzanne to witness the
traumatic death of her lover at a seaside resort. Afterward, Suzanne suffers
from hysterical amnesia: she has no memory of awaking unconscious on a
rocking boat while her lover dies in her arms of a gunshot wound. Her family
and friends enlist the medical expertise of a psychotherapist, Herr Williams,
who has been experimenting with cinematographic treatments for clinical
hysteria. Suzanne’s visual cure hinges on the latency between live-action

recording and cinematic exhibition: she reenacts the traumatic events sur-
rounding her lover’s death and then later watches her own participation
in the reenactment projected in a private film theater (see figs. 4 and 5). It
is thus not the calling to memory of repressed trauma that cures her, but
precisely her experience of the latency of trauma through the gap between
cinematographic recording and projection. Like a film audience’s laughter,
which stirs up distant muscle memories and gives them fresh somatic life,
Suzanne’s reflexive spectatorship relieves the somatic burdens of memory
through the visual experience of film reenactment.
Many scholars have associated the modern iconography of female
hysteria with the advent of photography. Didi-Huberman superimposes the
mysterious appearance and miraculous disappearance of hysterical symp-
toms—“an extraordinary bounty of symptoms [. . .] [that seemingly] issue
from nothing”—over the unknowable referent of photographic representa-
tion: the inevitable gap between photographic image and indexical reference
(74). Photography has been similarly crucial to archiving the physiological
regulation of nineteenth-century women’s laughter and smiling. Parvulescu
emphasizes the importance of photography, figural portraiture, and other
visual forms of facial caricature as crucial to the cultivation of gelatoscopy,
“the art of divination by laughter. Its premise: show me how you laugh,
and I will tell you who you are” (52). The temporality of the photographic
snapshot proved ideal for illustrating both the character of the laughing face
and the somatic effects of the hysterical gesture. Given the frequent associa-
tion between photography and death, it is curious that death from laughter
has never become an issue for photographic representation. I would argue
that this was the case because the instantaneity of photography failed to
capture the fatal duration of women’s hysterical jubilation. Where is the
point when laughter shifts from spontaneous pleasure to endless agony?
This fatal turn—the prick or punctum of photography’s association with
death22—never adheres to death from laughter, which uncannily resembles
a cinematic discourse in which a contradictory event can only be captured
through movement. The action and experience of death from laughter was
constantly in motion. The complex temporality of death from laughter—its
slippery line between rising joy and imminent mortality—stemmed from
the dually exhilarating and destructive encounters between women’s bodies
and modernity’s cult of entertainment.
For example, when a spectator’s loud, impromptu sneeze inter-
rupted a love scene during a melodrama, the audience found release through
Figures 4 and 5
The Mystery of the
Rocks of Kador by
Léonce Perret (1912).
Suzanne faints after
overcoming her hys-
terical amnesia by
watching a cinemat-
ographic reenact-
ment of a traumatic
event.
the tension between moving image and its embodied reception. “At the
precise instant that the lovers’ lips met some man in the audience exploded
with a gigantic sneeze, whereat the whole house blew up with spontane-
ous hilarious laughter” (“Enlivened”). Shortly afterward, an incidental,
knowing look from the onscreen lover again triggered and intensified the
audience’s collective, vocal mirth. “At the sight of his smiling face the audi-
ence again blew up.” This rhetoric of explosion, blowing up, and hysteria
remained just that—hyperbole, without danger of injuring the spectator’s

body—due to the film’s narrative pacing and sequential continuity. “But, of
course, the pictures kept on moving all the time, and in half a minute the
audience had once more settled down to look on again at the pictures in the
usual quiet.” Charcot himself experimented with public performances of
visual projection in order to demonstrate the very real basis of the hysteric’s
bodily symptoms—to prove, simply put, that the patient was not a malingerer.
In one memorable incident at the Salpêtrière, which a visiting physician in
the audience later recounted, a young woman under hypnosis was guided
to imagine that the mustache and facial features of a spectator in the audi-
ence were farcically elongated (Morton). Though the image was suggested
and implanted in her mind during hypnosis, it provoked her laughter only
upon her awakening, when she burst into hysterics.
Moving pictures exhaustively exploited the temporal gaps
between an image’s sudden movement or transformation and its evocative
recognition and conscious recollection for a laughing spectator. The evi-
dence of this constant interplay between laughing spectator automatisms
and hysterically suggestive imagery is apparent in the iconography of the
films themselves. Early film comedies exuberantly flaunt their overwhelm-
ing impact on the bodies of laughing film spectators. For example, musical
vibrations become contagious in The Irresistible Piano (Alice Guy-Blaché,
France, 1907) and Rosalie and Her Phonograph (Romeo Bosetti, France,
1911) and even ingestible in Arthème Swallows His Clarinet (Ernest Servaès,
France, 1911).23 In Irresistible Piano, the mere image of a polka note is enough
to set a body in motion, disrupting everyday life and domestic labor while
bewitching the entire neighborhood into a collective dance around the
piano. This enchantment is explicitly evocative of hysterical automatism,
calling to mind the precise gestures of somnambulism that Charcot and
Janet elaborate. Although the lures of the polka are hypnotic, their effects
on characters’ bodies instead give way to spastic convulsions—unpredictable
and uproarious gestures—rather than meticulous reenactments springing
from latent traumas. The hysteric iconography of bodily gesture in early
cinema thus represents a direct challenge to the isolation of separate ideas
of automatism posited by clinical theories of hysteria, on the one hand, and
philosophical notions of laughter, on the other.
Beyond the collective intoxication of dancing, the contagious
escalation of everyday nervous tics provided a deep well of fascination for
early filmmaking. For example, laughter, sneezing, yawning, and twitching
overwhelm mass crowds, anomalous individuals, official employees, and
inanimate objects alike in films including Laughing Gas (Edwin S. Porter,

United States, 1907), The Yawner (Segundo de Chomón, France, 1907), That
Fatal Sneeze (Lewin Fitzhamon, United Kingdom, 1907), and The Epidemic
(Essanay, United States, 1914). While nervous tics inevitably lead to cata-
strophic annihilation in early films (epitomized by the man who dies of
uncontrollable sneezing in That Fatal Sneeze), many such representations
of bodily evisceration prove curiously reversible—like the hysteric’s symp-
toms themselves. Bodies erupt, get dismembered, and then are sutured back
together through trick cinematography in The Dancing Legs (Vitagraph,
United States, 1908), An Odd Pair of Limbs (Vitagraph, United States, 1908),
The Thieving Hand (J. Stuart Blackton, United States, 1909), and Turn-of-the-
Century Surgery (Alice Guy-Blaché, France, 1900) (see figs. 6–8). Like the
limits of the individual body, the line between movement and stillness—or
even life and death—often became gleefully and anarchically fungible.
Drawing on gendered conventions of the tableau vivant and living picture,
women’s bodies were often placed at the threshold between ecstatic motion
and placid immobility. For example, women pose as inanimate objects
(such as statues, billboards, dolls, and puppets) that abruptly spring to life
in Kiss Me! (Biograph, United States, 1904), The Hilarious Posters (George
Méliès, France, 1906), A Midnight Fantasy (am&b, United States, 1899), and
The Statue (Alice Guy-Blaché, France, 1905). The comical hilarity of emer-
gent paradigms in film movement and temporality were conjured through
fantastic displays and manipulations of the gendered body onscreen—with
tremendous implications for theorizing the contingent experiences of ner-
vous, overstimulated, and volatile spectator bodies across a wide variety of
exhibition contexts and locations.
Bean, Gordon, Rabinovitz, and others have emphasized the cor-
poreal mimicry that takes place between screen bodies and film spectators.
In her essay on Charlie Chaplin, Bean invokes Freud’s notion of “ideational
mimetics” to explain “the unusual or ‘incongruous’ external perceptions
[that] catalyze the body into laughter’s convulsions” (“Imitation” 257). To
paraphrase, the spectator internally mimics the excessive gestures per-
formed by the slapstick clown—for example, “when a speaker opens his eyes
wide while speaking of largeness”—and then laughs it off “when the energy
generated for mimetic play is rendered unnecessary.” This relay between
suggestive onscreen action and convulsive spectator laughter remains
purely mechanical, however—untouched by the unconscious burdens of
memory and desire. Unlike the symptoms of hysteria or laughter at jokes,
according to Freud one’s bodily mimicry of comic movements and actions is
Figures 6, 7, and 8
Baron Munchau-
sen’s Dream by
Georges Méliès
(1911); Arthème Swal-
lows His Clarinet by
Ernest Servaès (1912);
and Princess Nicotine
by J. Stuart Blackton
(1909), three films
that thematize vari-
ous forms of bodily
disarticulation, such
as limb dismember-
ment, miniaturiza-
tion, decapitation,
and metamorphosis.
strictly preconscious and never subjected to unconscious revision or censor-

ship. Freud’s efforts to theorize “the comic” (in distinction from “jokes” or
“humour”)24 in Jokes therefore stem from and reinforce the problematic divi-
sion between laughter and hysteria that I have emphasized. In the context of
early cinema, the laughing spectator’s experience of cinematographic move-
ment cannot be understood alone as an effect of bodily mimicry and nervous
release. Rather, in order to think this complex relay between image, action,
and sensation involved in film spectatorship, it is necessary to theorize the
relationship between hysterical laughter and laughing hysteria.
Motion pictures provided a visual text for inciting and codifying
the mysterious relationship between action, image, and evocative sensation
embodied by the laughing hysteric. They celebrated these automatisms while
offering a visual metadiscourse on the secret affinities between nervous
hysteria and laughing jubilation. Filmmaking thereby emerged as a spe-
cifically visual cure for clinical hysteria: for the nervous muscle memories
that might become symptomatic at any provocation—or potentially fatal
in extreme cases of laughter. Walter Benjamin has famously designated
spectator laughter at slapstick film comedies as a “psychic immunization
against [. . .] mass psychosis.” In the second version of “The Work of Art in
the Age of Its Reproducibility,” Benjamin emphasizes the dialectical risks
and potentials of “technology and its consequences”: “Dangerous tensions
[. . .] have [been] engendered in the masses at large—tendencies which at
critical stages take on a psychotic character—one also has to recognize
that this same technologization [. . .] has created the possibility of psychic
immunization against such mass psychoses. [. . .] Collective laughter is one
such preemptive and healing outbreak of mass psychosis. [. . .] American
slapstick comedies and Disney films trigger a therapeutic release of uncon-
scious energies” (118). In early film theory and clinical neurology, as well
as in commentaries on popular culture, cinema was frequently invoked
as a technological remedy for the catastrophic, collective consequences
of nervous psychological repression. The nineteenth-century theater of
female hysteria served in many ways as a benchmark—or even an omen—for
making visible the cumulative disaster of modernity’s effects on rational
consciousness (which Frankfurt School theorists such as Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno elaborated in very pointed terms).25
In the context of nervous hysteria, prevalent fears of female
laughter (specifically its lack of internal boundaries or limits) were coun-
tered by the rapid pacing and continuous action projected by motion
pictures. The dialectical entanglement between human and machinic
perception indeed represents well-trodden territory of critical media theory.

For Benjamin, film epitomized the collective possibilities of vision as an
optical unconscious, which Esther Leslie defines as “a mode of percep-
tion made visible on celluloid and initiated by cameras [. . .] a reciprocity
between human (un)consciousness and machinic perception” (57). Gordon
has very suggestively adapted Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious
by drawing on neurological constructions of the body as a repository of
repressed sensations and nervous muscle memories. According to neurolo-
gists such as Binet, Féré, Ribot, and Richet, Gordon argues, our perception
of an object or movement continues to live inside us, to possess our mus-
culature, breathing, and vascular system: “What nerves have assimilated
continues to live in them” (45). Therefore, instead of the optical uncon-
scious, which specifies the visuality of technologized perception, Gordon
emphasizes the viscerality of visual spectatorship with her notion of the
corporeal unconscious. She defines this entity as one’s oversaturation
with latent corporeal impulses and mental associations: “[I]t is the body’s
automatisms that remember what the conscious mind ignores” (20). Like
Charcot and Janet, Gordon uses hypnosis or somnambulism as a model
for how the body can simultaneously register a sensation and lack any
conscious recognition of doing so.
The style of early cinema—favoring corporeal spectacle over psy-
chological realism—capitalizes on the time lag between visceral experience
and the conscious awareness of any given bodily sensation. For example, in
Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (Edwin S. Porter, United States, 1906), the bodily
discomfort of eating too much cheese and feeling overstuffed quickly gets
parlayed into an abstract hallucinatory sequence in which objects move,
furniture items dance (including a flying bed), and a man falls from the
sky and tears his clothing on a weathervane. In The Kitchen Maid’s Dream
(Vitagraph, United States, 1907), an overtired maid dismembers her own
limbs through stop-motion cinematography in order to finish her house-
work on time. Early cinema was a hotbed of suggestive somatic triggers,
from exploding automobiles and vanishing ladies to hallucinatory dairy
products and comestible wind instruments to contagious nervous tics and
uncanny metamorphoses. Tom Gunning has famously defined early cinema
as a “mode of attractions,” comparing the jolting corporeality of early film
aesthetics to Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary experiments with planting
exploding firecrackers under the seats of Soviet theater spectators (Bordwell
6). To invoke Georges Bataille’s idea of “the practice of joy before death”:
“There are explosives everywhere that soon will blind me. I laugh when I
think that my eyes persist in demanding objects that will not destroy them”
(239). Bataille pursued the agonizing ecstasy of laughter as a form of philo-
sophical rupture and breakthrough: hysterical automatism parlayed into
laughing jouissance. Like Bataille (though perhaps not quite to the same
extent of viscerally charged, philosophical rigor), early film audiences were
obsessed with images that thematized the physical eruption of the laughing
body in the public sphere—in a variety of ways.
A man dies of uncontrollable sneezing in That Fatal Sneeze; an
inanimate portrait comes to life by contracting contagious yawning in The
Yawner; an African American woman spreads her laughter contagiously
through the public sphere (to police officers, day laborers, and church rev-
elers) in Laughing Gas; and ladies spontaneously combust due to a variety
of triggers in films including Mary Jane’s Mishap (G. A. Smith, United
Kingdom, 1903), The Finish of Bridget McKeen (Edison, United States, 1901),
Nora’s 4th of July (am&b, United States, 1901), How It Feels to Be Run Over
(Cecil Hepworth, United Kingdom, 1900), and The Anarchist’s Mother-in-Law
(Viggo Larsen, Denmark, 1907). In early film representations and specta-
torship conventions alike, women’s bodies were frequently provoked and
solicited to become convulsive. A housemaid might explode or dismember
her own limbs onscreen, thereby provoking “hysterical,” “side-splitting,”
and “gut-busting” mirth for all audience members, regardless of sex or
gender. If Freud attempted to universalize the idea of hysteria by analyzing
male patients, early cinema literalized this universality of female hysteria
by addressing all spectators as effectively hysterical. Discursively, the liv-
ing body of the laughing female spectator was caught in a web between the
democratization of laughter and the universalization of hysteria. Again,
between hysterical laughter and laughing hysteria, the female laughing
spectator of early cinema had a radically visceral and complexly ambivalent
relationship with her onscreen counterimage.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, allegorical novelist of Victorian female
hysteria,26 theorized silent cinema as a form of “mind-stretching.” According
to Gilman, cinema’s unprecedented ability to traverse distant spaces and
times has the capacity to reveal the gendered contradictions of mass culture
in their temporally and spatially condensed totality. Beyond the medium’s
direct educational value or its sociological significance, as Gilman puts it,
film makes visible the story of how life moves (288). She elaborates:
If the last sixty years were shown in all their changes of women’s
dress on the same figure, swelling and shrinking, rising and
sinking, trailing on the ground, cut off to the knee, wasp-waist

and no waist, high collar and naked back; if the thing were
presented as a whole, with its increased change of speed, then
we might be able to stretch our minds wide enough to ask why
we must thus spin like a top under the lash of a salesman. (290)
No doubt, the perils of lexis cacchinitis were further compounded by the

inhibiting, constricting, and tight-laced corsets, which remained staples of
feminine fashion through the early twentieth century.
Modern culture—with its overwhelming crowds, anarchic mass
politics, proliferation of distracting images, and hyperstimulating new tech-
nologies—severed women’s experiences from traditional ideals of feminin-
ity. Moving images played a crucial role in capturing and negotiating this
process of gendered historical change. This is precisely the question of gen-
dered hysteria and hysterical laughter that so many early films demanded
of their embodied spectators: how does it feel to be a laughing woman in
early twentieth-century mass culture? Early cinema poses this question in
a variety of ways from the abstract to the concrete. When a woman sponta-
neously combusts out of the chimney (Mary Jane’s Mishap) or dismembers
her own limbs to expedite her labor time (The Kitchen Maid’s Dream), or
when a miniature nicotine fairy physically melts after being sprayed with
soda water (Princess Nicotine, J. Stuart Blackton, United States, 1909), what
kind of relationship between comedic violence and convulsive laughter do
these images accommodate? More than just discharging or laughing off some
kind of inner excess, the spectator of these images arguably internalizes a
degree of the violence and rupture from the film worlds depicted onscreen.
Film images of anarchic female laughter provide rich sources for
grasping the slippery and dynamic interplay between cinematic movement
and spectator corporeality—between hysterical automatisms, spectator expe-
rience, and the discourse of filmmaking. For example, in Betty and Jane at
the Theater (1911),27 two unruly women attend a dramatic stage play. They are
clearly marked by their coarse manners, voluble laughter, and gaudy cloth-
ing as the opposite of the fragile, polite, and sensitive type of woman who
might laugh herself to death at the theater—such as “the stylishly dressed
woman [who] await[ed] identification in the morgue” (“Laughs Herself to
Death: Young Woman”). Film historians have primarily discussed this film
in relation to the escalating class tensions between unruly mass audiences
of nickelodeon storefront theaters and the film industry’s recruitment of
middle-class clientele.28
Figures 9 and 10
Rosalie et Léontine
vont au théâtre by
Romeo Bosetti (1911).
Betty and Jane (their
American names)
laugh hysterically at
a hokey stage play
in this French film
comedy that was
widely exhibited in
the United States.
More than foils for filmmaking’s social gentrification or artistic

legitimation, Betty and Jane are portrayed as film spectators confronted with
the wrong medium. Their behavior is not just unruly, but subtly coded as
metacinematic. They exhibit demonstrative, visceral responses with their
bodies to every dramatic detail and gesture onstage (despite the distanced
proscenium and hokey production values of the live show). Betty and Jane
long to translate their dramatic experience into tactile responses—habitually
reaching out and touching the bald heads of the gentlemen sitting below
them, soaking the men with excess tears wrung from their handkerchiefs,
and gesticulating wildly at every minute provocation. Every time their vis-
ceral exhibitionism repels and alienates those around them, Betty and Jane
respond with gleeful, raucous, and spontaneous laughter. Their laughter
springs from the gap between theater audience decorum and Betty and
Jane’s own cinematic attunement (see figs. 9 and 10).
If, for example, Betty and Jane had been film spectators of
Madame’s Cravings (Alice Guy-Blaché, France, 1906) or The Dancing Legs
or The Irresistible Piano29—all films about the comical dialectic between
visual images and visceral sensations—then perhaps their yearnings to
act out tactile responses to visual provocations would have been satisfied
by the bodily figurations depicted onscreen. Perhaps the image of an artist
painting fire “so realistically that flames burst forth” (“Vitagraph”) from
the canvas or of a man who turns into a horse and gallops away as in The
Result of Eating Horse Flesh (Pathé, France, 1908) would have overpowered
their irrepressible desires to fondle the bald men’s heads in an embodied
response to a stage actor’s microscopic gestures. This is the subtext of Betty
and Jane at the Theater: how does a body behave in response to an image?
For Betty and Jane, laughter erupts precisely from the gap between the
audience’s staid decorum and their own need to somaticize every single
possible object, event, or trigger. In this sense, cinema further represents
an antihysterical medium, in that it parlays bodily experience into the vis-
cerality of shape-shifting images, rather than somaticizing the vicissitudes
of emotional experience, which is what the hysteric allegedly does.
Whereas the laughing hysteric can seemingly sustain any degree
of physical violence inflicted on her, for the hysterical laugher, submit-
ting to even a mild case of the giggles might be tantamount to committing
suicide. These proliferating oppositions between the polite woman, whose
body would be annihilated by laughter, and the madwoman, whose laugh-
ter is all text, increasingly shaped and defined the meaning of femininity
against the constant solicitations to visceral pleasure endemic to modernity
and mass culture. All film spectators came to take up the place of the hys-
terically laughing woman, caught between the morbid excess of extended
jubilation and the deferred eruption of hysterical automatism. Moreover,
this productive tension between women’s hysterical laughter and female
laughing hysteria made its mark on early cinema, on both its viscerally pro-
vocative imagery and its magically erasable, hysteric iconography. Women’s
laughter—at once an overlooked symptom of clinical hysteria and a fatal
incitement to obsessive self-regulation—was cut loose among early film

audiences. Laughing film spectators frequently encountered their hysterical
doppelgängers right before their eyes, writhing, erupting, and convulsing
gleefully across the screen.
maggie hennefeld is an assistant professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at

the University of Minnesota. Her essays on comedy, gender and early cinema have appeared
in Camera Obscura, Discourse, Early Popular Visual Culture, and Film History. She is the
author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, forth-
coming) and coeditor of “The Abject Objection: Theories of Graphic and Comedic Violence,”
currently under review.
Notes 1 It is impossible to know with any 4 In What Happened in the Tunnel,

definitive certainty which of these a white woman wards off a male
reports are factual, which are masher by trading places with her
exaggerated (to varying degrees black maid when the train enters
of narrative embellishment), and a tunnel. The dual terrors of racial
which are purely fictional. Certain miscegenation and white female
journalistic sources, such as the vulnerability dissolve into a racist
New York Times, merit greater sight gag and then get displaced
credibility than others, such as the through laughter. In contrast,
Michigan Kalamazoo Gazette. I A Kiss in the Tunnel reveals the
would encourage all readers—as I amusing hanky-panky of a couple
have done—to regard these stories who uses the darkness of the tun-
about women dying from laughter nel as a fun opportunity to steal a
as regulatory discourses: they secret kiss.
reveal profound anxieties about
the place of women’s laughter in 5 Shortly before Esther Wakefield
the public sphere, as well as the contracted “the kissing bug,”
management of female pleasure in Mrs. Mary Steger was proclaimed
the home. dead due to a fatal sting by the
Melanolestes picipes. The Chicago
2 This article is primarily con- Chronicle described the crowds
cerned with discussing the pano- at Steger’s funeral as a “morbidly
ply of efforts to think hysteria and curious throng which waited
laughter in relation to women, below to see the insect’s victim”
since these efforts repeatedly fail (“Many”).
to theorize women’s laughter and
female hysteria in relation to one 6 See Gilbert and Gubar.
another.
7 The word “hysteria,” of course,
3 The Chicago Chronicle was a well- comes from the Greek hystera,
respected news source that ran meaning “uterus.” The “wander-
from 1895 to 1908. The Chronicle ing womb theory” refers to the
was founded by Horatio W. Sey- ancient Greek supposition that
mour and Martin J. Russell on May hysterical symptoms, such as
28, 1895, in response to the merger lethargy and difficulty breathing,
between Chicago’s Times and Her- were caused by the dislodging and
ald newspapers in order to advo- wandering of the uterus around
cate for the policies of the Demo- the body.
cratic Party in the city (Story 153).
8 Had Esther Wakefield been 11 Freud explicitly associates the

included among the twelve female fear of losing teeth with castration
patients (in addition to six male anxiety: the encounter with psy-
patients) on whom Freud modeled chosexual difference as a terror of
his “Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), physical lack. In his analysis of the
perhaps Freud’s entire arche- “Rat Man” (Ernst Lanzer)’s obses-
type of the unconscious would sional neurosis, Freud discusses
have been very different. Freud the patient’s dream, in which a
based his idea of “the seduction dentist threatens his older sister
theory” (the foundation of neuro- that she “will lose all [her] teeth.”
sis in repressed childhood sexual As Freud reports, the patient “was
trauma—a theory that he problem- astonished when I explained that
atized throughout his career) on masturbation was responsible for
case studies of these eighteen hys- it” (“Notes” 269).
terical patients. He writes in “The
Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896): “Our 12 One of the most remarkable cases
view then is that infantile sexual of contagious female laughing
experiences are the fundamental hysteria took place at an all-girls
precondition for hysteria [. . .] but boarding school in Tanzania (then
that they do not do so immediately, Tanganyika) in 1962 (shortly after
but that they remain without effect national liberation from British
to begin with and only exercise a colonial rule). The “Tanganyika
pathogenic reaction later, when Laughter Epidemic” afflicted
they have been aroused after between 95 and 159 pupils, of ages
puberty in the form of unconscious twelve to eighteen, with symptoms
memories” (212). lasting between several hours and
over sixteen days (Bartholomew).
9 I have found over seventy news
articles claiming that women died 13 For further reading on race and
(or nearly died) due to the uncon- physiological typologies of the
trollable escalation of their hyster- photographic smile, see Sheehan.
ical laughter. In addition to these
14 “There is without a doubt a lesion
cautionary tales about the perils of
of the nervous centres, but where
laughing while female, there were
is it situated, and what is its
many cultural discourses—includ-
nature? [. . .] But certainly it is not
ing etiquette manuals, reformist
of the nature of a circumscribed
literature, and philosophies of
organic lesion of a destructive
laughter—instructing women in
nature [. . .]. We have here unques-
the proper techniques of laugh-
tionably one of those lesions which
ter: do not make any noise, show
escape our present means of ana-
your teeth, or convulse your dia-
tomical investigation, and which,
phragm. Among the leading evan-
for want of a better term, we
gelists of polite or civilized laugh-
designate dynamic or functional
ter were Florence Hartley, George
lesions” (Charcot 278).
Meredith, M. L. Rayne, Alice Wel-
lington Rollins, Kate Sanborn, and 15 Janet references the epidemics
George Vasey. of hysterical barking rampant at
convents during the Middle Ages,
10 Tracy Wuster cites Vasey’s Phi-
wherein “nuns began by hundreds
losophy of Laughter and Smil-
to howl, bark, or mew. It was nec-
ing (along with Percy Shelley’s
essary to threaten them with a hot
writings and the Old Testament)
iron to silence them” (262).
as classics of the “misegolast”
(laughter-hating) genre.
16 One of Freud’s patients, Frau from his basic definition of the

Emmy von N. (Fanny Moser), “a punctum, the idiosyncratic detail
young woman prone to somnam- that strikes its viewer—the “sting,
bulism, facial tics, spastic stam- speck, cut, little hole” (27). Barthes
mering,” also exhibited a “curious posits death as a second form of
clacking sound from her mouth punctum.
that defies imitation” (Studies 49).
23 For more on the hysterical conta-
17 For further readings on the gen- gions of the dance film, see Köhler.
dered public sphere politics of
early film spectatorship, see 24 Freud revised his idea of humor
Bean and Negra; Hansen; Peiss; in the 1927 essay “On Humour,”
Rabinovitz; Stamp; and Stewart. in which he goes beyond his eco-
nomic viewpoint of humor as a
18 For further discussion of the ico- means of minimizing unpleasure
nography of hysteria in relation to in order to account for humor’s
tropes of female metamorphosis dynamic relation to the death
and comic violence, see Hennefeld. drive. He does this by arguing that
the humorist adopts the position
19 For further reading on the convul- of the superego and then treats
sive laughter of early film specta- the ego as a child, “an attitude by
tors, see Cahill; Gordon; King; and means of which a person refuses
Parvulescu. to suffer, [and] emphasizes the
invincibility of his ego by the real
20 Leon Baer warned Portland film- world” (163).
goers in 1908:
The worst evil, however, of 25 Horkheimer and Adorno did not
attending moving picture shows, share Benjamin’s utopian belief in
lies in the fact that such undue the healing powers of collective
excitation of nerves and eyes tend laughter. They argue in their chap-
to physical and mental injury. We ter “The Culture Industry”: “To
adults sit in the darkened show moments of happiness, laughter
place with tense brows and fixed is foreign [. . .]. Fun is a medicinal
eyes, while the film sputters its hur- bath which the entertainment
ried course before our bewildered industry never ceases to prescribe.
and strained vision. [. . .] For hours It makes laughter the instrument
afterward, we experience a faint for cheating happiness” (112).
and almost imperceptible tighten-
ing of the eyeballs, and the lids bat 26 Lacking any such source of mental
nervously. Statistics show that a stimulation, the hysterical female
very great part of the trouble so protagonist of Gilman’s The Yellow
much commented upon among Wallpaper becomes completely
the children in our public schools obsessed with the synesthetic
is due to constant attendance at iconography of her bedroom
moving picture shows. wallpaper.
21 For an excellent account of the 27 At a screening of this film in the

dialectic between hysterical neur- colonial nation formerly known
asthenia and turn-of-the-century as Rhodesia, it was reported that
French entertainment culture, see “Betty and Jane fairly convulsed
Gordon. the audience” with laughter
(“Posada”).
22 In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
further distinguishes the morbid 28 In Babel and Babylon, Hansen
temporality of the photograph cites this film, Betty and Jane at
the Theater, as a revealing exam- around the public sphere pilfering

ple of “the mismatch between the and ingesting various objects of
female spectator and the subject oral desire, including a child’s lol-
of classical cinema” (124). Hansen lipop, a wine lover’s absinthe, and
associates the symbolic inscrip- a beggar’s pickled herring. In The
tion of narrative film subjectivity Dancing Legs, a pair of rogue legs
with the film industry’s aesthetic attaches itself to people’s bodies,
codification and bourgeois legiti- provoking cross-gender antics and
mation, which was being negoti- various public sphere mishaps. In
ated during this 1909 moment. She The Irresistible Piano, the image of
thus interprets Betty and Jane’s musical sound itself becomes con-
“unsuitable, hysterical behavior” tagious, causing bodies to dance
as a gendered disciplinary foil hysterically and uncontrollably.
for the construction of a classical These films are just examples of
gaze. how spontaneously and exuber-
antly onscreen bodies are seized
29 In Madame’s Cravings, Guy- and transformed by visceral cues
Blaché plays the title character, in early cinema.
a pregnant woman who wanders
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maggie hennefeld

Death from Laughter, Female Hysteria, and Early Cinema

W hat separates the colloquial expression “hysterical laugh-

For example, in 1893, Bertha Pruett was entertaining guests at

witnessed” (Charcot 405). While a humorous idea could allegedly murder a

The Singular Case of Miss Esther Wakefield

In 1899, a young woman named Esther Wakefield was allegedly

Miss Wakefield was [overcome by] fits of boisterous laughter and

Fellow riders aboard that car were startled by a sudden burst of

burning kisses by as charming a girl as one might find in many a

[h]ere is what still puzzles the physicians and seems to be giving

Esther’s “kissing bug” literalizes the popular nomenclature for a pestilent

Esther Wakefield’s raging libido and hysterical laughter. Anna O. herself

Art and Picture Col-

Beyond psychoanalysis, in a wide variety of clinical and popular discourses,

these authors assume an implicit congruence between the physical damage

were frequently associated with “serious uterine trouble” in mass cultural

duration and in the company of a group—Barr’s laughter was more than

Fatal Lexis Cacchinitis and the History of Death from Joy

Sometimes referred to as the “perils of feminine cacchination”

music” (“Death from Laughter,” Daily Picayune). Echoing the cacophonous

of the arteries [. . .] [making] them quite brittle” (“Death from Laughter,”

a “corpse having a life-like appearance [. . .] as in a trance or sleep.” Female

Women’s Hysterical Laughter vs.

While women’s convulsive, contagious, and sometimes termi-

that Speetzen “was bleeding to death as a result of a ruptured blood ves-

thus emphasizing the hysteric’s bodily mimicry of organic physiological

Feminist Theories of Laughter, Language, and Hysteria

It is a truism of psychoanalytic feminist theory that hysterical

Without a proper voice in the symbolic—or without the means to articulate

(exemplified by Alison Kibler’s Rank Ladies, Kathleen Rowe’s The Unruly

colloquialism of hysterical laughter, then, clinical hysterics like Dora had

Hysteria at the Limits of Laughter:

As I have argued, women who embodied and upheld traditional

the most important philosophy of humor and laughter in modernity.) To

Death from Laughter in the Public Sphere:

Female revelers in the public sphere were dropping like flies:

The most striking thing about women’s laughter at early film

hysteria. Suzanne’s visual cure hinges on the latency between live-action

remained just that—hyperbole, without danger of injuring the spectator’s

inanimate objects alike in films including Laughing Gas (Edwin S. Porter,

strictly preconscious and never subjected to unconscious revision or censor-

perception indeed represents well-trodden territory of critical media theory.

sinking, trailing on the ground, cut off to the knee, wasp-waist

No doubt, the perils of lexis cacchinitis were further compounded by the

More than foils for filmmaking’s social gentrification or artistic

incitement to obsessive self-regulation—was cut loose among early film

maggie hennefeld is an assistant professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at

Notes 1 It is impossible to know with any 4 In What Happened in the Tunnel,

8 Had Esther Wakefield been 11 Freud explicitly associates the

16 One of Freud’s patients, Frau from his basic definition of the

21 For an excellent account of the 27 At a screening of this film in the

the Theater, as a revealing exam- around the public sphere pilfering

Bordwell, David. The Cinema of Eisenstein. Cambridge: Harvard up, 1993.

“Chicago Film Brevities.” Moving Picture World 14 (1912): 328–29.

“Death from Excessive Laughter.” Riverside Daily Press 21 May 1896: 2.

“Death from Laughter.” Daily Picayune 14 Feb. 1875: 8.

“Death from Laughter.” New York Tribune 4 Oct. 1897: 2.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography

Gallop, Jane. “Keys to Dora.” In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism. Ed. Charles

. The Yellow Wallpaper. Boston: Bedford, 1998.

Hennefeld, Maggie. “Destructive Metamorphosis: The Comedy of Female Catastrophe and