Unruly Pleasures of Scholarship: On Maggie Hennefeld’s Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema

Ladies can laugh at the pleasures of the world, but not too much. It might kill them. In *Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema *(2024), this provocation sets the stage for Maggie Hennefeld’s exploration of laughter as a volatile, gendered, and historically fraught affect in film history. One of the guiding questions of Hennefeld’s book asks: “How differently would we view the history of Western culture and philosophy if women had taken centre stage in the entanglement between critical thinking and deadly laughing?” (p. 76). This is central to foreground the histories of gendered labour in early cinema, wherein she does not treat “hysterical laughter” as a diagnostic nomenclature but as a historical phenomenon – “a muffled complaint” (p. 94) – gestured through the registers of enjoyment.

The wide array of film examples, from early “facials” (p. 19) designed solely to show funny expressions to complex narrative melodramas about mental illness, trace how hysteria and laughter became centralising themes and commercial assets in early cinema historiography. These cinematic examples reveal the dual valence of hysteria, wherein it was simultaneously an exploitable commercial gimmick (used to sell tickets via insurance against death by laughter) and a complex signifier for pathological neurosis that the burgeoning medium claimed it could both trigger and aesthetically soothe.

Léontine devient trottin (Léontine Becomes a Scooter)

Archival Plenitude

Hennefeld’s project on the marginalised forms of protest through laughter is carried out through the method of “hysteria-historiography” (p. 11). This method involves engaging with the cultural archives of cinema as a recuperative feminist imperative to attend to erasures and inconsistencies in early film. Here, the book is filled with archival material that spills across sentimental novels, anecdotes, medical images, film texts, and obituaries in its plenitude. Rather than categorising the material in a tidy genealogy, Hennefeld favours the leaks and overlaps of this archival excess. Thus, the archival plenitude opens ethical and methodological questions.

Death by Laughter resists neat delineation because the gendered phenomenon of laughter it studies is itself excessive, spanning film cultures, jokes, popular entertainment, medical discourse, and everyday ephemera. This plenitude introduces a productive difficulty. The reader is pulled into detours, intersections, and sidesteps as the very wayward mobility of the object itself. The text mirrors the unruliness of female bodies with its multiple entry points, shifting vocabularies of laughter, and intersecting histories that demands of the reader a flexibility that no single interpretive frame can hold.

Hennefeld’s sensibility of “archival ragpicking” (p. ix) mirrors the labour-intensive, embodied method of “gathering despite scattering” in reclaiming what dominant histories treat as “disposable.”1 The feminist stakes of such a practice highlight the state’s archival neglect in preserving the histories of wayward bodies dissonant with national narratives, as well as the enduring stigma around female cine-workers. As a citational kin, both Cooley and Hennefeld insist on fragmentary archives as a condition of feminist knowledge-making. Their work attends to scraps, tail-ends of reels, comic excess, and ephemeral traces to weigh the worth of what has been overlooked by shifting our attention towards a politics of waste and recovery. Like the culturally-resonant kabadiwala, the scrap-dealer in the Indian context who moves through the city gathering what domestic households no longer recognise as valuable, Hennefeld’s work picks through the archive’s excesses by restoring their potent charge in holding the key to alternative film histories.

Discipline and Comic Disruptions

One of the central concerns of the book is the social and somatic cost of emotional expression. The affect of hysterical laughter prompts us to ask: Which bodies can express emotions publicly, and at what cost? Hennefeld shows how hysterical laughter oscillates between the registers of a medical disorder and commercial entertainment. She historicises hysteria to connote its convulsive meanings ranging from a clinical diagnosis to recreational enjoyment that signal the anxieties around female laughter in their excessive and asphyxiating potential. The ambivalent ground of laughter becomes a “fragile script” (p. 27) for young women to cryptically encode their complaints within the confines of patriarchal domesticity in the 19th century. While White women’s laughter was pathologized through contradictory registers of grief and relief, anxiety and pleasure, the laughter of Black subjects was dismissed as a symptom of inherent “animality” (p. 41). At stake in these interpretations is a persistent fear of laughter as an anti-establishment impulse that threatened the legible linguistic codes of the masculinist discourse.

The cultural regulation of female laughter is evident in etiquette manuals such as *The New Laugh *(1898), which instructed young women to laugh with their mouths closed and teeth hidden to tame the extraneous gendered noise. Scientific attempts at control appear in the photographic experiments of the French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who sought to classify laughter through facial electrocution by capturing female faces mid-spasm as fugitive expressions of mixed pain and joy. His aesthetics of asphyxiation, exemplified by “mug shots” (p. 36), signal a broader patriarchal desire to suppress excessive female pleasure by fixing fluid affective expressions under the technological guise of photographic truth. The scientific regime contributed to the policing of the female body into a static sign of suffering rather than considering the audibility of laughter as a full-throated utterance of social protest.

Against these regimes of control, Hennefeld turns to early cinema’s unruly figures, especially Léontine. “LONG LIVE LÉONTINE!” – Hennefeld’s characteristic email sign-off – conveys the irreverent spirit of these early films. The proliferation of close-ups, especially those framing uncontrollable laughter, exposed audiences to what she calls the “empirical fugitivity” (p. 213) of the performing body in their non-compliant pleasures. In the Léontine Series (1910–1912), the final shots invariably return to her anarchic habits as she laughs wildly, sticks her tongue out, unchastised and indifferent to the redemptive moral arc of the narrative. Her intractable escapades slip out of the narrative grasp, and what remains is the unrestrained plenitude of the comic body – disorderly, ephemeral, and excessive.

Fugitivity as Method

Throughout Death by Laughter, fugitivity emerges as an embodied feminist analytic rooted in the heretic, demonic, and wicked grounds of scholarship, operating through the liberatory spaces of laughter immanent to dominant structures. The fugitive method refuses to walk in an orderly manner as it is untethered to predictable pathways of dominant historiography. Instead, it prioritises non-chronological and elusive sources that are excluded from the original order of the archive. Fugitivity enacts the creative longing of the researcher to feverishly write, while being haunted by the cackles of the comic ghosts, to articulate unrealised film histories. It becomes a critical writing method to take speculative flights of fancy to fabulate what might have occurred in early film history that goes against the grain of the official archival records. Further, the volatile spontaneity of laughter, through the transient nature of its expression, possesses an instability within the gendered symbolic order. When repressed memory, in its attendant expressions of anxiety, fails to find “a satisfying outlet in the waking life” (p. 104), the fugitivity of hysterical laughter erupts as a militant methodology of subterranean resistance.

Hennefeld examines psychoanalytic frameworks to show the intermingling of female sexuality and colonial imagery through Sigmund Freud’s discussions. She highlights Freud’s claim that adult female sexuality resembled a “dark continent” (p. 136), relegated to “an abyss of fugitive desire” (p. 136), which stays shrouded from the clinical gaze of the male psychoanalyst. In this light, the explosive affect of hysterical laughter becomes a distinctly gendered release from the scientific strangleholds of the psychoanalytic discourse. The aesthetics of waywardness are visualised through emblematic shots, dissociated from the central narrative, at the end of the film, where the “Medusan miscreants” (p. 19) would heartily laugh and make faces directly into the camera. A somatic manifestation in this tradition of hysteria-historiography is Laughing Gas (Vitagraph, 1907), in which a Black woman inhales nitrous oxide and transmits it to segregated white spaces, leading to accidents like comedic contagion. In the end, she laughs hysterically looking at the camera to celebrate her irresistibly tumultuous joy. Similarly, the Léontine Series (1910–1912) revels in convulsive moments of laughter where the female protagonist remains delectably unbothered by the wreckage in the diegetic space, free from the pressures of making matters right.

La pile électrique de Léontine (Léontine’s Electric Battery)

Distinct from commercial films and comedy shorts was medical and documentary footage studied by neurologists with patients undergoing facial spasms, seizures, and epileptic fits as “fugitive symptoms” (p. 18). She also analyses slapstick comedies such as The Mad Musician (Selig, 1908), An Auto Maniac (Vitagraph, 1909), and Ham in the Nut Factory (Thanhouser, 1915) that were frequently screened in mental asylums as part of the visual cures of the moving image, funded by the federal government in Chicago. In contemporary cinema, Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019) and Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) operate as anticapitalist film satires, using “pseudobulbar affect” (p. 123) – involuntary pathological laughter – to manifest afflictions of masculinity and the horrors endemic to institutional structures that fail to protect their citizen-subjects, only to escalate human misery through alienated protagonists driven to madness.

Hennefeld’s writing, situated at the intersection of film historiography, comedy studies, and feminist theory, moves fluidly between high theoretical discourse (Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Lacan) and playful, irreverent rhetoric with exclamation marks and UPPERCASE fonts. The book invokes Hélène Cixous’s conceptualisation of the “Laugh of the Medusa” by deploying as an “urtext for a feminist counterpolitics of antipatriarchal enjoyment” (p. 63). The mixing of genres through theory, history, sensational reportage, and popular dailies produces critical speculations and counter-readings that resist academic austerity. Hennefeld defines her inclusive use of the “we” as a clarion call to the readers “who feel similarly interpellated by an impulse at hand” (p. 11), forging a community bound by sudden flashes of laughter. I read this as a political gesture to evoke the insurgent pleasures of scholarship by inaugurating a renewed order of reading experience. It imbues her prose with a sense of law-breaking defiance in stretching the boundaries of research with a mischievous yet meticulous methodology. Hennefeld thus offers a strategic refusal of the quantifiable “findings” demanded in contemporary academia, proposing instead that scholarship can be practiced through joy, pleasure, and unruly enjoyment. The feminist praxis of generating knowledge, she reminds us, lies in “how we write, in who we cite” (p. 17) to build more inclusive worlds of scholarship.2

**Maggie Hennefeld, *****Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema ***(New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).

Endnotes

1. Claire Cooley, “Gathering Despite Scattering: A Feminist and Decolonial Method of Curation,” Feminist Media Histories, Issue 10 (April 2024): pp. 10-33. ↩
2. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 17. ↩