Primordial Laughter

Laughter—a multi species trait—is said to be between ten million and sixteen million years old. Science, destroyer of myths, would reduce laughter to mere social signal that separates those who get the joke, from those who do not: laughter as cruelty. The reapplication of myth, in this case a certain variety of modern literature, will irradiate the past instead with a strong dose of comic fatalism: the ape, sitting alone in the mist-shrouded twilight jungle so many millions of years ago, appalled at the sheer horror of existence and yet, due to her keen sense of irony—and that needs no audience—laughing nevertheless.