Rituálny smiech v ľudovej kultúre.
Ritual laughter in folk culture

Summary/Abstract: Laughter itself represents a physiological reaction of a person to various mechanical, or spiritual, cognitive, and intellectual stimuli. Psychology deals with emotions in the form of studying processes that accompany human laughter and which are probably related to deeper layers of the psyche. But the function of laughter in society and culture can be revealed only when we look at laughter in the context of the aesthetic category of the comic. At that moment, its archetypal, historical, social, political, artistic, aesthetic, sociological, linguistic, ethnological, and other perspectives are uncovered to us. The peak of European discourse on this issue is represented by the work of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, François Rabelais, and the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in which the author defined the concept of "laughter culture". Rabelais's novel Gargantua and Pantagruel can be considered, among other things, as a Renaissance encyclopaedia of traditional folk culture of France in the 16th century. Alongside the author's fict ional creation, there are evident contemporary expressions of comedy and laughter in tradit ional folk culture in this work, which are still present in our domestic traditional folk culture. Ritual laughter in traditional folk culture is taboo laughter, festive laughter, liberating laughter, purifying laughter, laughter of rebirth, but above all, it is current laughter.

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