Lets Teach Humanity by Smile

Laughter or smile is a uniquely human reaction to the phenomenon of comicality. Its character, types and perception have been analyzed since antiquity by representatives of numerous scholarly disciplines. However, they are scarce in Polish pedagogy. This paper presents comicality as a cultural phenomenon, connecting people into 'laughing communities', independent of their social positions, but uniting them on the ground of common sense of humor. This is because perception of comicality depends only on individual culture level, spread between primitive vulgarism and sophisticated, intellectual wit. The presented research results answer the question if school introduces youngsters into the world of laughter community and, if so, what values it uses to create this community, whether and what kind of laughter culture it creates, and eventually whether it teaches 'humans humanity' to quote Plessner.