agelast
One who never laughs (especially at jokes); a mirthless person.
Noun
- One who never laughs (especially at jokes); a mirthless person.
- As a real agelast in a comedy, he is beaten. The beating of an agelast is the most important point of the comedy. - 2005, Arkady Kovelman, Between Alexandria and Jerusalem: The Dynamic of Jewish and Hellenistic Culture,...
- Declaring with Doumergue that "Rabelais and Calvin (and Olivétan) were the creators of French literary prose,"²⁵ Bakhtin adds "Even the agelast Calvin wrote a pamphlet about relics with a certain comic overtone."²⁶ The...
- For Kundera, agelasts represent the opposite of the spirit of the novel; the novel is born from the sense of humor and not from theoretical thinking. - 2016, Mika Hallila, “Chapter 7: How the Novel Laughs”, in Rafał...
Antonyms: gelast laugher cachinnator hypergelast
Origin
Learned borrowing from Ancient Greek ἀγέλαστος (agélastos, “not laughing”), from γελάω (geláō, “to laugh”). Attributed to a French coinage by François Rabelais (ca.1483–1494—1553).