TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

The undersigned has previously discussed the Agelast, a non-smiling archetype, demarcated as a character to be re-evaluated through AI-generated humour. In artistic terms, there was an attempt to depict this newly generated humour in oil paintings, where portraiture reached the point of being transformed into buffoonery.

The smile of the Agelast is not comical; rather epitomizes a smile of the unsmiling, formed as the Uncomical Humorous. Defining a meta-agelast is an investigation on this problematic. In direct contrast to the "Agelastos" stands the natural philosopher Democritus, a counterpart who is famously referred to as the "constantly laughing" or the "laughing philosopher."  Art, in this context, expands into the subterritories of philosophy, from the sublime, extended towards a laughingstock; it may produce an “eternal laughter,” a seriously problematic, petrified projection of the ideal. This juxtaposition delineates a profound philosophical antinomy, wherein the Agelast, an archetype of feigned solemnity and the renunciation of laughter, rather stands in a distinctly dialectical opposition to Democritus, the archetypal "laughing philosopher," whose ceaseless laughter signifies an ontological engagement with the absurd. As a crucial dichotomy, it encapsulates conflicting existential approaches, reflecting the epistemic and aesthetic tensions between gravitas and levity, problematising the boundaries of philosophical and artistic discourse.

Devolved into absurdity, perpetual laughter, as denoted through art, is a profound philosophical stance on the incoherence of the human predicament.