Hell's Upgrade

But it won't have a dome

The nuances of laughter

Classroom disobedience comes in various levels. I was a not-so-secret laugher throughout school. Some of us never outgrew our penchant for snickers, chuckles, and chortles, usually to the dismay of our instructors. I looked up those terms online to better appreciate their distinctions.

• Snicker (verb): to laugh in a covert or partly suppressed manner

• Chuckle (verb): to laugh inwardly or quietly

• Chortle: similar to chuckle, probably a blend of chuckle and snort

• Bonus definition - Guffaw (noun): to laugh loudly or boisterously

The more serious the subject matter, the more delicious the counter reaction. It took discipline and diaphragm control to keep these maladies from advancing to shaking, snorts, and shedding tears. I failed on several memorable occasions, especially in college. Fortunately, I learned to confine those outbursts to student lounge areas or semi-private library reading stations by my junior year. Art studios remained exempt from constraint.

I majored in art, not literature, but a couple of surveys of classic literature, one of which included Inferno from The Divine Comedy, continue to reward me with inspiration for editorial cartoons. The creative descriptions of specific punishments meted out by demons in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno could only come from a comedian.

Human Sh*t for Bullsh*tters

Circle 8 of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, also known as Malebolge, is tailored to fraudsters. Malebolge is comprised of ten different ditches, also known as bolgias. The funniest punishment in this ring is arguably for flatterers in the second bolgia: they are submerged in a ditch of human excrement. That’s an excessively harsh penalty for those who have spent their lives praising others excessively. I mean, isn’t BS an integral part of mass communication today? Let he who is without sin take the first dunk.

Maybe the supply chain woes of 2020 that led to a toilet paper shortage were training for what lies ahead in the afterlife.

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Get serious about laughter

If you want to get serious about laughter, check out 10 different types of laughter. I didn’t find any audio clips there, but I heard examples of each in my mind’s ear.