Text from exhibition catalog "A day without laughter" (Lhoist Art Collection, curator Pascale van Zuylen, Guest curator Harry Gruyaert)

What triggers laughter? What kind of joke induces hilarity? Very often, the accident does. As when a gesture or behaviour goes wrong, causing something unexpected to occur. When a moment strays and upsets the ordinary run of things. Certainly there are also thoughtful forms of humour, light and as if caressing, such as that of the very fine papier-mâché of the dress in Kiki Smith’s sculpture, Seated Girl with Owl. But let’s start with the most violent, the most radical: mad laughter, crazy laughter—full-throated, noisy, thunderous laughter. Laughter can be a form of excitement, an uncontrolled discharge of energy, a phenomenon linked to surprise. Laughter can seize you, more often in a very bodily, convulsive way. And everyone knows from experience: the more we run away from this laughter, the more strength it finds, the more it ravages us inside, looking for a way to show everyone its roar. Try to hold it down, it will catch up with you. This laughter, this coarse laughter, this uncontrollable laughter, devoid of reason, without manners, almost always seems to be linked to an accident. Accidents in the style of those short shows on television that used to kick off our evenings in the 1980s or 1990s—blooper reels filled with skiing, cycling, and skateboarding mishaps, people veering off course, mortifying clumsiness, overambitious plans to negotiate obstacles, subverted goals of heroism, frustrated boldness, the pie-in-the-face, falling objects, trays of food tipping onto customers’ shirts, burlesque slips, etc. We would also laugh at children who could barely walk yet, at their unbalanced gait, at their unexpected falls into a flowerpot.