The work begins as a socio-historical diagnosis: in the field of view, the bourgeois condemnation of laughter as a process of collective self-censorship. Because in contrast to the ’rabble’ curiosity on the one hand, and the decadent aristocratic lust for pleasure on the other, the German educated bourgeoisie is increasingly making use of reason as an identity-creating system of order. But reason - in life as in art - can only assert its prerogative through the control of the emotional and instinctual life. In this way the comic becomes the repressed from this order, the devaluation of laughter and the pleasure in the (comic) body become a civic duty. This mentality-historical process is exemplified by the development of the genre comedy and the theater as a medium.