I used to think that the jarring, unsettling laughter of robots in SF movies served as proof of their non-human origins, an affective Turing Test that helped the reader sift out the (implicitly lesser) non-humans from the privileged human. So, when Haley Joel Osmond bursts into rapid-fire mechanical laughter in AI, or Robot Maria contorts her face into a maniacal mask as she burns to death in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, it was a relief for the viewer, proof that despite their physical approximation to the human, these beings had been mechanical and manufactured all along.
I've spent the last few years collecting laughter-moments, bizarre or out-of-place laughs in film, literature, court transcripts, television, music recordings. What these moments show me, repeatedly, over and over, is not that laughter is the exceptional affective right of the human ("we are the animal that laughs") that helps to police and reinforce the ontological boundary between human and non-human, subject and object.
What these moments of weird laughter have shown me, whether they be broken and rigid ha-ha-ha's or loose-limbed lyrical wails of laughter, is that laughter itself is non-human.
It is not that the alien cannot laugh. Rather, it is laughter that is alien.
Like the narrator of Handmaid's Tale, laughter overruns us, it breaks down our ability to think, know, or be. We are transformed, momentarily, into a shaking and quaking object - an object among objects. We are thrust into a different philosophical plain, in which ordinary ontology is split open, as wide open as our choking gasping laughing mouths. What we do from there, what that enables us to do, becomes the question.
I've spent the last few years collecting laughter-moments, bizarre or out-of-place laughs in film, literature, court transcripts, television, music recordings. What these moments show me, repeatedly, over and over, is not that laughter is the exceptional affective right of the human ("we are the animal that laughs") that helps to police and reinforce the ontological boundary between human and non-human, subject and object.
What these moments of weird laughter have shown me, whether they be broken and rigid ha-ha-ha's or loose-limbed lyrical wails of laughter, is that laughter itself is non-human.
It is not that the alien cannot laugh. Rather, it is laughter that is alien.
Like the narrator of Handmaid's Tale, laughter overruns us, it breaks down our ability to think, know, or be. We are transformed, momentarily, into a shaking and quaking object - an object among objects. We are thrust into a different philosophical plain, in which ordinary ontology is split open, as wide open as our choking gasping laughing mouths. What we do from there, what that enables us to do, becomes the question.
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