Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact with the reality where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and bellow, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety, before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. . . . Familiarization of the world through laughter and popular speech is an extremely important and indispensable step in making free, scientifically knowable and artistically realistic creativity in European civilization.