hypergelastic

comparative more hypergelastic · superlative most hypergelastic

1. literaryrareLaughing excessively.

   I am young. I cry out with youth. I sing young songs. My laughter is hypergelastic. It tumbles over tables and chairs.

   1929 October 20, Philip DeVilbiss, “Youth”, in The Carolina Magazine, volume 1, number 2, Chapel Hill, N.C.: Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, →OCLC, page 8, column 2

   4 more examples

   I thought of [George] Meredith, and a lecture on him when he died, his doctrine of the hypergelastic, the laughter beyond mirth.

   1949, Christopher Morley, The Man Who Made Friends With Himself, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., page 235

   He [Ogden Nash] is, of course, a great temographic historian; he can remind us, better than any other writer, what has griped us in our hideous and hellbound civilization. But he plunges the needle with such generous and hypergelastic opiate that even as we perish we bless his name.

   1949 March 9, Christopher Morley, “Pull Over to the Curb”, in The Saturday Review of Literature, volume XXXII, number 12, New York, N.Y.: Saturday Review Associates, Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 17, column 1

   When laughter becomes unbridled, especially when socio-cultural restraints do not apply, the whole musculature becomes involved. The face flushes, the eyes water, the hypergelastic bore may throw his limbs and trunk around, and indulge in contact gestures like elbow digging.

   1975, MacDonald Critchley, Silent Language, London: Butterworths, →ISBN, page 43

   The Bible seems to refer to such a hypergelastic character in the saying of Ecclesiastes: "As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool.

   1978, Evan Esar, The Comic Encyclopedia: A Library of the Literature and History of Humor Containing Thousands of Gags, Sayings, and Stories, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., →ISBN, page 375