In Trevor Griffiths's play Comedians (1975), Eddie Waters, an ageing stand-up comedian, recalls visiting a Nazi death camp. Waters, who toured Germany with the Entertainments National Service Association a year or two after the Second World War, relates that, at the end of the day in which the entertainers visited the camp, he was in the audience as a fellow-comedian told ‘this joke about a Jew’ and notes that ‘people laughed, not inordinately, just…easily…And I sat there. And I didn't laugh.’ The twin realisations come to Waters that some places are or should be unvisited by laughter and that laughter itself can be lethal: ‘I discovered…there were no jokes left. Every joke was a little pellet, a…final solution.’

Waters's failure to join in the laughter expresses an intuitive understanding of the ethics of humour. Laughter, as Philip Glenn points out, is indexical: ‘it is heard as referring to something and hearers will seek out its referent’. But seeking laughter's referent – ‘the laughable’ – in the war zone uncovers death on a mass scale, appalling injury, incalculable loss. Now, laughter and its causes are culturally specific and its appropriateness, as has been widely discussed, varies according to such factors as historical moment, subject, social setting, situation and genre. Nonetheless, laughter's universality has also been asserted and, whatever the cultural and historical variables, it is hard to imagine finding war's potential ‘laughable’ anything other than very unamusing indeed. Prima facie, war is agelastic.