Thinking with Laughter: Notes on Walter Benjamin’s Humour

At first sight, Walter Benjamin and laughter may seem to be an unlikely connection, particularly when humour is understood as a personal disposition, a receptivity for the comic.The image of Benjamin ingrained in collective memory is undoubtedly that of the melancholic intellectual. This is how he appears in the iconic photos taken of him by Germaine Krull and Gisèle Freund: deeply immersed in thought, often with his head resting on his fist or absorbed in old folios at the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is tempting to describe these images as surrounded by an aura, whose decay Benjamin even saw at work in portrait photography.