Podcast Summary

New Books Network

Host: Nathan Smith
Guest: Delia Casadei, author of "Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound" (U California Press, 2024)
Date: October 21, 2025

Episode Overview

In this insightful conversation, music historian and independent scholar Delia Casadei discusses her groundbreaking book "Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound." The episode explores how laughter, often treated as peripheral in studies of humor and comedy, becomes central when examined as a bodily technique and sonic phenomenon. Casadei traces the cultural, philosophical, and technological history of laughter from ancient times to the age of phonographic sound, focusing on its ambiguous relationship to human identity, mechanical reproduction, and social contagion. The discussion delves into issues of race, technology, political subjectivity, and historical methodology, drawing connections from Aristotle to canned laughter on American television.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis and Motivation for the Book

• Personal & Scholarly Journey: Casadei shares that the project traces back to her early days as a trainee musicologist, driven by persistent curiosity about the relationship between sound, laughter, and music. She resisted the academic norm of adapting her dissertation into a first book, opting instead for a work she felt deeply compelled to write.
  • Quote: "I always knew to an extent that the relationship of sound, laughter, and music was important to me... So I think that there is a kind of kinship with this project and me that started from the get-go." (04:12)
• Academic Detours: While her thesis focused on Italian modernism, the laughter project continuously ran parallel as a side interest, surfacing in her earlier papers and eventually blossoming into a central research focus.

2. Methodology and Intellectual Framing

• From Humor to the Act of Laughter: Casadei critiques traditional musicology's focus on humorous intent in music, instead foregrounding the act of laughter itself—its sounds, performative repetition, and broader effects.
  • Quote: "The question of laughter itself was sort of being left… on the side. It's the idea of what in a piece of music might cause laughter... but never the act itself." (08:10)
• Influence of Anca Parvulescu’s "Laughter: Notes on a Passion": This text inspired Casadei to consider laughter as an act with political resonance, beyond causes or content.
• Self-Conscious Confirmation Bias: Casadei openly acknowledges that part of her method is a productive and reflective "confirmation bias" — searching for her preexisting hunches within historical sources before discovering unexpected complexities.
  • Quote: "The whole book… is like a massive confirmation bias that I am really glad worked out..." (11:17)

3. Historiographical Fold & Presentism

• Modernist ‘Fold’: Casadei uses the metaphor of a modernist fold to frame the moments when sound and laughter converge in her analysis—drawing on both philosophical and technological inflection points.
  • Quote: "I knew that this kind of ability to focus on it was probably in some way enabled by a kind of phonographic regime..." (19:24)
• Candid Reflexivity: Both host and guest discuss the value and risks of broad, interdisciplinary scholarship and the importance of a grounded, self-aware approach to bringing past and present into critical dialogue.

4. Laughter, Human Identity, and Technology

• Sonic Definition of the Human: The discussion highlights how laughter has historically served as a defining trait of humanness, often used to distinguish humans from animals—yet this construction is always fragile and prone to collapse.
  • Quote: "Only humans are the only laughing animals... but actually if you look at the literature, there's always a moment where it sort of collapses—don't you lose your reason when you laugh?" (33:15)
• Anti-Identitarian Dimensions: Laughter emerges as an inherently unstable marker—signifying both community and alienation, humanity and mechanization.

5. Phonography, Capitalism & Contagion

• Technological Determinism & The Phonograph: Casadei proposes that phonographic technology not only enabled laughter to be isolated and commodified as sound, but also affected which types of sounds thrived on early audio media. Laughter’s loud, discontinuous profile made it suited for wax cylinder recording and international mass marketing.
  • Quote: "Laughter is a kind of self-packaging commodity at this moment in time... It worked in this way." (45:54)
• Laughter Songs & Racialization: Early phonographic laughing songs, particularly George Washington Johnson’s "Laughing Song," became global commodities deeply linked to processes of racialization—often marketed based on the racial identity of the performer and consumed within orientalist and minstrelist frames across contexts.
  • Quote: "The laughing songs of the 1890s were almost always issued from a kind of racialized person... the racializing aspect continues." (52:43)
• Contagion as Commodity and Threat: The concept of ‘contagion’ inhabits multiple registers—biological, social, and technological. Laughter becomes a vehicle for both pleasure and anxiety, mirroring the ambiguous desires and fears mobilized by global capitalism and imperialism.
  • Discussion draws on works like Anjuli Raza Kolb’s Epidemic Empire to connect the transmission of laughter, disease, and colonial ideology. (59:31)

6. Canned Laughter and Media Critique

• McCarthyism and Manufactured Affect: The rise of canned laughter in mid-20th-century American television is discussed as both a labor-saving technological fix and as a site of political paranoia—audiences expressed anxiety over the inability to distinguish authentic laughter from artificial laughter.
  • Quote: "There was a whole kind of McCarthyist paranoia building around whether canned laughter was being used to enhance TV shows..." (73:02)
• Labor and the Laughter Machine: Laughter becomes a form of labor itself, with studio audiences ‘performing’ responses for hours—or replaced by recorded effects. The machinery of laughter thus intersects with histories of labor struggle and the automation of affect.
• Contemporary Resonance: Parallels are drawn to current anxieties about AI-generated content and sponsored media—wherein the real commodity is the promise that audiences can distinguish ‘authentic’ from ‘artificial’ pleasures.
  • Quote: "What is being sold is not the laughter, but the knowledge that, you know, whether it's real or not... That you are immune to brainwashing..." (80:08)

7. Race, Colonialism, and Desire for Proximity

• Orientalism & Minstrelsy: The desire for ‘contagious’ laughter encoded in media links to a broader desire for proximity to racial others—a phenomenon at work in blackface minstrelsy and the wider functions of musical entertainment in imperial and colonial settings.
  • Quote: "It was a way also of experiencing a kind of proximity to the voice of... a racialized other without actually having them in your face." (63:30)

8. Political Paranoia, Ideology, and Skepticism

• The conversation moves into present-day politics, with host and guest reflecting on media manipulation, propaganda, and the difficulties of navigating sincerity, cynicism, and ‘brainwashing’ in the digital age. Laughter, as pleasure, is itself made suspect.

9. Solidarity Without Certainty

• Practical Politics of Feeling: Casadei closes with a call to hold onto basic solidarity—to trust one’s sense of wrong, even in the face of ideological and informational overload. Avoiding “presentist bias,” she reminds listeners that anxieties about manipulation and authenticity in mediated experiences have deep historical roots.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Affirming Confirmation Bias as Method
  • "I wanted to make sure that the confirmation bias became a self-conscious methodology... I actually think that that's how the history of ideas works." — Casadei (21:50)
• On Laughter as Anti-Identitarian
  • "When I laugh, am I more human or am I more animal? Do I become more mechanized?... It's a very uncomfortable inability to define, which I like." — Casadei (35:00)
• On Phonography and Laughter
  • "I am convinced that a lot of these writers started thinking about laughter... only because of the phonographic imagination." — Casadei (41:27)
• On Racialization and Laughter
  • "Laughter is this thing that is human, but not properly… When that balances together with racializing effects and mass production, this is a way of introducing to other people a form of humanity that's sort of palatable…" — Casadei (54:15)
• On Canned Laughter and Political Paranoia
  • "People wanted to be reassured they could tell a fake or prerecorded laughter from a real one... There is a very interesting labor history behind it..." — Casadei (76:30)
• On Authenticity and Skepticism
  • "What is being sold is not the laughter, but the knowledge that you know whether it's real or not... that you are in fact immune to brainwashing..." — Casadei (80:08)
• On Solidarity and Historical Repetition
  • "We should escape the presentist bias... We can have solidarity with people around us but also with the historical actors before us... Let's not assume we're the first people to suffer it." — Casadei (91:52)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• Introduction & Overview — 01:37–03:37
• Personal Genesis of the Book — 03:58–06:45
• Defining the Project’s Methodology — 07:51–12:13
• Historiographical Reflection: Folds, Bias, Engagement — 13:01–23:01
• Laughter and Human Identity — 31:30–36:21
• Phonography, Modernity & Laughter — 38:43–49:22
• Racialization, Contagion, and Capitalism — 51:51–68:15
• Canned Laughter, Paranoia, and Labor — 69:16–81:37
• Politics of Paranoia, Ideology, and Present Moment — 81:37–93:24
• Solidarity & Conclusion on the Meaning of Laughter — 94:39–97:06

Tone and Style

The episode maintains an intellectually playful, candid, and reflective tone. Both host and guest move fluidly between rigorous scholarly critique, personal anecdote, and political engagement—creating an atmosphere of thoughtful, sometimes self-deprecating, inquiry. Casadei’s language is lively, witty, and often openly vulnerable, making complex theoretical and historical material accessible and engaging.

Summary Takeaways

Delia Casadei’s "Risible" rethinks the history of laughter as both a cultural technique and a sound, showing how its entanglement with technology, capitalism, and race has made laughter a site of both pleasure and anxiety, solidarity and exclusion. The conversation offers listeners a dynamic model for how critical scholarship can be attentive to method and politics—embracing both the messiness of history and the ambivalence of mediated experience. Throughout, laughter emerges not as a superficial response to humor, but as a deeply significant phenomenon—one that resists definition, complicates identity, and profoundly shapes our social worlds.