Hypergelastic

I am young. I cry out with youth. I sing young songs. My laughter is hypergelastic. It tumbles over tables and chairs.

I thought of [George] Meredith, and a lecture on him when he died, his doctrine of the hypergelastic, the laughter beyond mirth.

He [Ogden Nash] is, of course, a great temographic historian; he can remind us, better than any other writer, what has griped us in our hideous and hellbound civilization. But he plunges the needle with such generous and hypergelastic opiate that even as we perish we bless his name.

When laughter becomes unbridled, especially when socio-cultural restraints do not apply, the whole musculature becomes involved. The face flushes, the eyes water, the hypergelastic bore may throw his limbs and trunk around, and indulge in contact gestures like elbow digging.

The Bible seems to refer to such a hypergelastic character in the saying of Ecclesiastes: "As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool.