Despite the macabre topic of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and even though it remains very marginal, laughter makes its way through Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. This laughter can assume different shapes, depending on the contexts in which it appears; but it also indirectly reveals how the catastrophe affects humanity when confronted with it. Social norms are replaced by the contagion’s new inescapable ordinariness, which governs all relations – individuals’, but also those that bring together witnesses, authors, and readers. Truth and fallacy, reason and passion all blend together. While it would rather be expected in a comical context, instead of in the middle of a humanitarian disaster, laughter calls into question the new pathological normality that is being imposed on Londoners. However, its role is ambiguous: it creates the illusion of a possible way out of the disaster, while magnifying the inexorability of the evil it tries to neutralise.
