Originally a comment by AJ Milne on Refrain from laughter.
Philosophical documents on laughter, religious statements and mandates forbidding laughter–all these provide instructions on how and when and how hard to laugh. They designate the proper attitude one should take toward laughter, because laughter is our last “sense” to capitulate to authority…
… Imagine, then, being firmly seated in a position of authority and knowing that at any second the power to control and direct could be cut short by the lowliest peon–not with a Molotov cocktail or an Uzi automatic, but with riotous laughter…
(Barry Sanders, from Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History.)
… I figure it should be entirely unsurprising, whenever ‘prophets’ or the authorities who try to reuse their creed to cement their own power attempt to forbid laughter. Read the work of the former, and you have to figure that was the first reaction of much of the audience; initially, at least, they have hope it works out, and they get enough people to buy the line together to get a certain critical mass going. But ongoing laughter no doubt worries them, even once this is achieved. And the ‘prophet’ and their first followers, if still alive, I figure, are likely to remember this reaction bitterly. It takes them back to a very different world, when they had to be far humbler in their demands.
Religions prefer, I figure, therefore, generally to control it. Probably the only reason more of them don’t attempt so clumsily to ban it outright is this is a just a little too obvious. More subtle dissuasion will, however, do within communities, at least, once the creed is dominant enough. The rituals shall encourage a hushed, reverent attitude, or, if you are to smile, or perhaps holler or sing hallelujahs, it is to be done in a beatific, transcendent fashion. ‘Joyful’ may be okay. Leafing through the canon and cackling uproariously generally less so.