The laugh by Robert Abernathy
The laugh by Robert Abernathy is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. It explores a technocratic society’s effort to suppress spontaneous emotion, focusing on the pathologizing of laughter and the shaping of children into obedient, efficiency-driven adults. A small boy named Dicky watches ants in his backyard and, delighted by their antics and a memory of a frog, bursts into uncontrollable laughter. His shocked mother rushes him to
a towering clinic, where a calm psychologist tests him and explains to the parents that laughter is a wasteful “emotional outlet” to be corrected so the child’s energy can be channeled into productive action. After treatment and guidance, Dicky returns months later to the same slope; the weeds are mown, the secret thrill is gone, and his wonder has thinned into indifference. Remembering a tongue-twister from the clinic, he methodically crushes the anthill under his new heel and walks back to the house without a flicker of feeling, a quiet sign that the system has done its work. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77941.html.images | 44 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77941.epub3.images | 279 kB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77941.epub.images | 278 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77941.kf8.images | 1.1 MB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77941.kindle.images | 1.1 MB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77941.txt.utf-8 | 36 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77941/pg77941-h.zip | 238 kB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Abernathy, Robert, 1924-1990 |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Emshwiller, Ed, 1925-1990 |
| Title | The laugh |
| Original Publication | New York: King-Size Publications, Inc., 1956. |
| Series Title | Produced from Fantastic Universe, June 1956 (Vol. 5, No. 5.) |
| Credits | Tom Trussel (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature |
| Subject | Science fiction |
| Subject | Short stories |
| Subject | Psychological fiction |
| Subject | Boys -- Fiction |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77941 |
| Release Date | Feb 15, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 234 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |