TY  - BOOK
AU  - Abernathy,Robert
AU  - Emshwiller,Ed
TI  - The laugh
T2  - Produced from Fantastic Universe, June 1956 (Vol. 5, No. 5.)
AV  - PS 
PY  - 2026///
CY  - Salt Lake City, UT
PB  - Project Gutenberg
KW  - Science fiction
KW  - Short stories
KW  - Psychological fiction
KW  - Boys -- Fiction
N1  - Release date is 2026-02-15; Tom Trussel (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive); Originally published; New York: King-Size Publications, Inc., 1956
N2  - The laugh by Robert Abernathy is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. It explores a technocratic society’s effort to suppress spontaneous emotion, focusing on the pathologizing of laughter and the shaping of children into obedient, efficiency-driven adults.

A small boy named Dicky watches ants in his backyard and, delighted by their antics and a memory of a frog, bursts into uncontrollable laughter. His shocked mother rushes him to a towering clinic, where a calm psychologist tests him and explains to the parents that laughter is a wasteful “emotional outlet” to be corrected so the child’s energy can be channeled into productive action. After treatment and guidance, Dicky returns months later to the same slope; the weeds are mown, the secret thrill is gone, and his wonder has thinned into indifference. Remembering a tongue-twister from the clinic, he methodically crushes the anthill under his new heel and walks back to the house without a flicker of feeling, a quiet sign that the system has done its work. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
UR  - https://archive.org/details/Fantastic_Universe_v05n05_1956-06_Gorgon776/page/n3/mode/2up
UR  - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77941
ER  -