CNN reports:
From the frontiers of mirth research, scholars offer these words of comfort: If you are mortified of dancing for fear of being the butt of jokes, don’t worry, you are far from alone. There’s even a word for it — gelotophobia. Sound like a disease involving Italian ice cream? No, it’s the potentially debilitating fear of being laughed at. This condition — the term comes from gelos, Greek for laughter — was among the topics discussed this week at a four-day meeting of the International Society for Humor Studies, an Oakland, Calif.-based collective of psychologists, sociologists, linguists and other academics who probe funniness from every conceivable angle
The setting for all this debate is the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of “Don Quixote,” the mad knight who was always good for a laugh as he tilted at windmills. The president of the humor society, British sociologist Christie Davies, offered insights Tuesday on the state of humor in today’s world. Among other things, he said, jokes in eastern Europe were a lot better when the communists ran the show.
“Once you have a democracy with free speech, you have fewer jokes,” said Davies, an emeritus professor at the University of Reading, in England. “Jokes, in many ways, are a way of getting around restrictions on what you can say. That was a very important factor in eastern Europe.”
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