There are many people that say, "Laughter is the best source of medicine". I, for one, agree with this statement. Laughter is an essential part of life. I cannot see how anyone can live each day without laughing even just once. Laughter expresses many things. To me, laughter is an expression that one enjoys life. Laughter can even help in burn calories. Quite simply, laughter is supposed to be a good thing. As Max Beerbohm once said, "Nobody ever died of laughter". I tend to agree with that statement. That is, until I read Homer's Odyssey. After reading Homer's famous epic, my views on laughter changed a bit.
             Usually, you would think laughter in a story is just moment of good things. It could possible be seen as nothing but good things to come. The Odyssey, however, showed me that this laughter thing isn't exactly what it is cracked up to be. According to this epic, laughter is portrayed as an omen that can lead to some terrible consequences. Whenever laughter was expressed within the people in the epic, it would usually lead to some sort of backlash towards them in the future. If you smiled, you were probably safe. A chuckle or a wink would probably be okay as well. You can probably sing a song of joy and your chances of bad luck would still probably be less than if you were to laugh out loud. There were many instances in The Odyssey where people who expressed laughter suffered some heavy ramifications later on in the story. When the word laughter was mentioned anytime during the epic, you just knew that some poor soul was going to suffer something terrible. In this paper, I intend to demonstrate how laughter had negative effects with the characters of The Odyssey throughout the epic. I want to show how laughter brought about the downfall of a few key characters in The Odyssey. The important characters that suffered from this omen were the suitors, some of Odysseus' se...