| rdfs:comment
| - Trauma and tragedy tend to follow characters like plagues, and they often break them down, turning them into insane, jaded shadows of their former selves. This can often happen in various ways, but the best way to tell if a character just can't take it anymore is if they just break down and start laughing for no reason at all, or for all the wrong reasons. Usually, when this happens, they will continue to sit there, laughing uncontrollably, as if in a trance, until someone breaks them out of it, sometimes by a slap in the face. Examples of Laughing Mad include:
|
| abstract
| - Trauma and tragedy tend to follow characters like plagues, and they often break them down, turning them into insane, jaded shadows of their former selves. This can often happen in various ways, but the best way to tell if a character just can't take it anymore is if they just break down and start laughing for no reason at all, or for all the wrong reasons. Usually, when this happens, they will continue to sit there, laughing uncontrollably, as if in a trance, until someone breaks them out of it, sometimes by a slap in the face. Expect the laughing character to either gain control of themselves and apologize for losing it (while still emotionally fragile, of course), or, alternatively, simply stop caring about life. This may lead to them becoming distant, or become more harsh than before. More often extreme cases occur, causing a character to turn to complete madness, either going into an insane asylum or possibly twisting them further. On the flipside, villains are also prone to this. It is often shown as being fundamentally different than an evil laugh, usually shown as them either laughing a lot longer than normal, having the laugh sound more deranged than cold and boastful, or a combination of the two. This is normally shown if the writer wants to characterize the villain in a much more psychotic light and have a more frightening nature than normal. Expect it to also be used for a Villainous Breakdown in some cases. Like Insane Equals Violent, this phenomenon is rare in real-life instances of severe mental illness. In fact, a common characteristic of schizophrenia is the absence of laughter, or indeed of other indicators of emotion ("flatness of affect"). Of course, the Truth in Television here might come from Bipolar Disorder, where mania causes inappropriate laughter on a euphoric scale -- or Schizoaffective Disorder, which is the two in a blender. Then there's the simple fact that inappropriate laughter can accompany intense grief or anger, without actual mental illness needing to be involved - a related phenomenon is "hysterical laughter", where an intense bout of Inelegant Blubbering starts to resemble a laughing fit. Not necessarily related to Evil Laugh, but definitely a type of Freak-Out. Is also a sure-fire sign of Sanity Slippage. Also see Put the Laughter In Slaughter for maniacs who engage in this regularly. Sometimes overlaps into Die Laughing, especially if it is the result of a Villainous Breakdown. Not to be confused with Final Fantasy VI's Dancing Mad, although that game did act as the Trope Namer in regards to its main villain. Examples of Laughing Mad include:
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)