Charles Shaw

History’s most violent human conflict was deeply connected to laughter. On the Soviet side, laughter helped the state to articulate a just war between good and evil. Combatant states across the globe conceived of state-sponsored laughter as a weapon to foment hatred for the enemy, consolidate civic unity, and redirect domestic criticism. From below, civilians across continents used humor to cope, resist, and make sense of mass violence.  Laughter crossed borders among alliance partners, travelled across frontline trenches, and even passed through the barbed wire of POW camps. The project contends that World War II was a distinctive era in the history of humor and laughter. This lens will also offer insight into how cultural forms travel and transform in new contexts. It will inquire into the sustaining role of laughter in combat. And it will consider humor’s capacity as an expressive language for processing danger, violence, and loss. The task for my stay at IAS is to decide which geographies and sources to include beyond my initial research on the Soviet context. The goal will be to see whether laughter compels us to move beyond traditional geographic and historiographical boundaries such as the Eastern front, the Pacific Theater, and the Holocaust.

Website address: https://people.ceu.edu/charles_shaw