“The blessed in the kingdom”: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, Supplementum, Q.94, Article 1.
“To see others suffer does one good”: Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality (1887), trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 42–3.
“For the Melanesians who live on the remote Nissan Atoll”: Steven R. Nachman, “Discomforting Laughter: ‘Schadenfreude’ among Melanesians,” Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 42, no. 1, Spring 1986, pp. 53–67.
“in a laboratory in Würzburg in Germany in 2015”: L. Boecker et al., “The face of schadenfreude: Differentiation of joy and schadenfreude by electromyography,” Cognitive Emotion, vol. 29(6), 2015, pp. 1,117–25.
“want names”: Thomas Hobbes, “Human Nature” (1640), in Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 21–108, 58.
“there is no English word for Schadenfreude”: quoted in Wilco W. van Dijk and Jaap W. Ouwerkerk (eds), Schadenfreude: Understanding Pleasure at the Misfortune of Others, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 2.
“an infallible sign of a thoroughly bad heart”: Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality (1841), trans. E. F. J. Payne, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1965, p. 135.
“For Trench, the mere existence”: Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words, London and New York, Macmillan, 1872, p. 68.
“a secret satisfaction, of the malicious”: Thomas Carlyle, “Shooting Niagara: And After?” (1867), in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Vol. 30, Critical and Miscellaneous, vol. 6, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 11, 1–48.
“indulge in what the Germans call “Schadenfreude”: “Chess,” The Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 27 May 1881.
“In the 1890s, animal-rights campaigner”: Frances Power Cobbe, “Schadenfreude” (1902), in Prose by Victorian Women: An Anthology, Andrea Broomfield and Sally Mitchell (eds), Abingdon, Routledge, 1996, pp. 335–50.
“a certain amount of what the Germans call Schadenfreude”: The physician Sir William Gull, “Our London Letter,” The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 19 October 1887.
“I thank God, I thank God”: William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, III:i, pp. 95–7.
“the revenge of the impotent”: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 20.
“Golden Age of Schadenfreude”: https://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/the-age-of-schadenfreude/.
“We are living in an Age of Schadenfreude”: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/02/fyre-festival-brexit-schadenfreude-emotion-defines-times.
“the chronic malady of our times”: Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1948, p. 9.
“When the BBC reported the robbery”: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37546307.
“The Germans have a word for this”: Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty, London, Allen Lane, 2012, p. 64.
“that strange sense of inner satisfaction”: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866), trans. Nicolas Pasternak Slater, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 161.
“In the third century AD, the emperor Elagabalus”: This anecdote appears in Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling and Cracking Up, Oakland, University of California Press, 2014, p. 77.
“There is an ancient Egyptian tomb”: Salvatore Attardo (ed), Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, LA and London, Sage, 2014, p. 28.
“In 2011, a group of evolutionary psychologists”: R. I. M. Dunbar et al., “Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 279, 2012, p. 1,731. The anecdote about Mr. Bean appears in Dunbar’s interview with the BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14889165.
“the Sanskrit poet Bhanu Datta”: Salvatore Attardo (ed), Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, LA and London, Sage, 2014, p. 657.
“the Warlpiri of Yuendumu, in central Australia”: Y. Musharbash, “Perilous Laughter: Examples from Yuendumu, Central Australia,” Anthropological Forum, vol. 18(3), 2008, pp. 271–7.
“Freud has this theory”: Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), London, Penguin, 2002, p. 218.
“He called it ‘Ilinx’”: Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (1958), trans. Meyer Barash, New York, Free Press, 2001, p. 24.
“Amusingly / Robbed of his umbrella”: Salvatore Attardo (ed), Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, LA and London, Sage, 2014, p. 678.
“picture to yourself certain characters”: Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, New York, Dover, 2005, p. 46.
“The Earle of Oxford”: John Aubrey, Brief Lives (written 1679–80), London, Vintage, 2016, p. 305
“Driving back after a lovely meal”: “Are these the worst dates you’ve ever heard?.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-41173459
“There is the satisfaction”: Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, London, Hamish Hamilton, 2003, p. 37.
“ ‘Laughter,’ he wrote ‘is nothing else but a sudden glory’”: Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, p. 54.
“In 1727, John Byron, navy officer”: repr. in Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison (eds), A London Year: Daily Life in the Capital in Diaries, Journals and Letters, London, Frances Lincoln, 2013.
“In The Republic, written in the fourth century BC”: Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1988, pp. 215–16.
“I have heard of men who have travelled”: Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 203.
“How sweet it is to watch from dry land”: Lucretius, The Nature of Things, trans. A. E. Stallings, London, Penguin, 2007, p. 36.
“The Storm (1755)”: Quoted in Carl Thompson (ed), Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day, Abingdon, Routledge, 2013, p. 115.
“delightful horror”: Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), London and New York, Routledge, 2008, p. 134.
“the eighteenth-century art theorist Jean-Baptiste Dubos”: Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music (1719), trans. Thomas Nugent, London, Nourse, 1748.
“If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all”: William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), London, Macmillan, 1891, pp. 412–13.
“the chase / and the escape, the error”: William Carlos Williams, “The crowd at the ball game” (1923), in William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems, London, Penguin, 1976, p. 58.
“During the 2010 World Cup, two Dutch psychologists”: J. W. Ouwerkerk, and W. W. van Dijk (eds), “Intergroup Rivalry and Schadenfreude,” in Schadenfreude: Understanding Pleasure at the Misfortunes of Others, 2014, pp. 186–99, 186–7.
“people in the restaurant roared with delight”: The Fifth Down, New York Times NFL Blog, https://fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/manhattan-cheered-bradys-injury-did-you/.
“Send prayers & good wishes,” Lisa Coen, 6 August, 2017
“loathsome”: Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1847), trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 257.
“what clearer sign of debility could there be”: Charles Baudelaire, “Of the Essence of Laughter” (1855), in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet, London, Penguin, 2006, pp. 140–64, 146.
“When someone who delights in annoying”: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), trans. Lewis White Beck, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1949, p. 170.
“The study, carried out by Swiss researchers in 2004”: Dominique J. F. de Quervain et al., “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment,” Science, 27 August 2004, pp. 305, 1,254–8.
“during experiments like the one described above”: Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans,” Nature, vol. 415, January 2002, pp. 139–40.
“A more recent study has suggested”: M. J. Crockett et al., “The Value of Vengeance and the Demand for Deterrence,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 143(6), 2014, pp. 2,279–86.
“A group of researchers in Leipzig set up a puppet theater”: Natacha Mendes et al., “Preschool children and chimpanzees incur costs to watch punishment of antisocial others,” Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 2, 2018, pp. 45–51.
“He points to a study”: A. Strobel et al., “Beyond Revenge: Neural and Genetic Bases of Altruistic Punishment,” NeuroImage, vol. 54(1), 2011, pp. 671–80.
“and another that shows”: Tania Singer et al., “Empathic Neural Responses are Modulated by the Perceived Fairness of Others,” Nature, 2006, pp. 439, 466–9.
“There is even a study that suggests that pleasure peaks”: K. M. Carlsmith et al., “The paradoxical consequences of revenge,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 95(6), pp. 1,316–24.
“an initial happy little ‘Oh, wow, someone is fucked’”: Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publically Shamed, London, Picador, 2016, p. 68.
“The cultural theorist Adam Kotsko”: Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness: An Essay, Washington, O Books, 2010.
“what Lisa calls our own ‘affective niche’”: Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, London, Macmillan, 2017, p. 73.
“You’re not to think you are anything special”: Aksel Sandemose, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (1933), New York, Knopf, 1936, pp. 77–8.
“much laughinge of the standers by”: Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528/1561 trans.), London, J. M. Dent, 1994, p. 43.
“Among the Torres Strait Islanders”: J. Beckett, “Laughing with, Laughing at, among Torres Strait Islanders,” Anthropological Forum, vol. 18(3), 2008, pp. 295–302.
“utmost enjoyment of spoiling a friend’s self-satisfaction”: George Eliot, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” in Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), Oxford, OUP, 2015, pp. 3–70, 7.
“laden with years, and lingering away”: Jean de La Fontaine, The Fables of La Fontaine (1668–1694), trans. R. Thomson, Edinburgh and London, Ballantyne, 1884, p. 71.
“covered in shame”: Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (eds), The Writings of Quintus Sept. Flor. Tertullianus, vol. 1, Edinburgh, Clark, 1870, p. 34.
“day of national humiliation”: Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation 97: Appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer,” 30 March 1863.
“the biggest failure I knew”: J. K. Rowling, Commencement Address, Harvard University, 5 June 2008.
“Tigger is getting so bouncy nowadays”: A. A. Milne, The World of Pooh, Toronto, McClelland, 1977, p. 251.
“do not triumph in your brother’s disgrace”: Felix Adler, Moral Instruction of Children (1893), New York, Appleton, 1905, p. 212.
“maintain a conventional air of distress”: Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head, London, Vintage, 2001, p. 33.
“When psychologists asked in one study”: S. J. Solnick and D. Hemenway, “Is More Always Better?,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, vol. 37, 1998, pp. 373–83.
“The hypothesis was simple”: L. Colyn and A. Gordon, “Schadenfreude as a mate-value-tracking mechanism,” Personal Relationships, vol. 20(3), September 2013, p. 20.
“During the Second World War”: Samuel Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Adjustment to Army Life, vol. 1., New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1949.
“A house may be large or small”: Karl Marx, “Wage-Labour and Capital” (1847), repr. in David McLellan (ed), Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 284.
“In the 1980s the psychologist Tom Wills”: T. A. Wills, “Downward comparison principles in social psychology,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 90, 1981, pp. 245–71.
“Taylor noticed that during their interviews”: J. V. Wood, S. E. Taylor and R. Lichtman, “Social comparison in adjustment to breast cancer,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 49, 1985, pp. 1,169–83.
“More recent research”: B. Buunk et al., “The affective consequences of social comparison: either direction has its ups and downs,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 59, 1990, pp. 1,238–49.
“In the late 2000s, a choir was set up in Durban”: S. P. Black, “Laughing to Death: Joking as Support amid Stigma for Zulu-speaking South Africans Living with HIV,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 22 January 2012, pp. 87–108.
“While she was living among the Makushi”: L. Scherberger, “The janus-faced shaman: the role of laughter in sickness and healing among the Makushi,” Anthropology and Humanism, 30 January 2005, pp. 55–69.
“an absolute running of two souls into one”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series (1841), Boston, Munroe, 1850, p. 190.
“If you have either no fellow-feeling”: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), London, Millar, 1761, p. 26.
“in the adversity of our best friends”: François de La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections (1664), Maxim 1:99, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 155.
“he doth bestride the narrow world”: William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, I:ii, pp. 135–8.
“on three or four occasions”: quoted in John L. Locke, Eavesdropping: An Intimate History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 164.
“You’re a creature of ‘contempt and malice’”: Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, Sweet Smell of Success, dir. Alexander Mackendrick, 1957.
“There was the radio producer… the CEO… the corporate lawyer’s secretary”: Robert I. Sutton, The No Asshole Rule, London, Sphere, 2010, pp. 32–3, 130.
“His soul squints”: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, pp. 20–1.
“I don’t know when I’ve had a more juicy moment”: P. G. Wodehouse, “The inimitable Jeeves” (1923), in The Jeeves Omnibus, vol. 1, London, Hutchinson, 2006, pp. 401–580, 432.
“the Schadenfreude / Of cooks at keyholes”: W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety (1947), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 6.
“laughed in convulsions”: Anne Chalmers, The Letters and Journals of Anne Chalmers (1830), London, Chelsea, 1923, p. 95.
“The Akan of Ghana”: S. Attardo (ed), Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, vol. 1, p. 21.
“Schadenfreude-soaked liberals”: Isaac Chotiner, “Against Liberal Schadenfreude,” Slate Magazine, 12 March 2016.
“expressly requested not to exhibit Schadenfreude”: “The Samoan Difficulty,” The Morning Post, 13 April 1899.
“no opportunity of saying nasty things”: “German Unfriendliness,” The North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 20 February 1900.
“In the run-up to the 2004 American presidential election”: David J. Y. Combs, Caitlin A. J. Powell, David Ryan Schurtz and Richard H. Smith, “Politics, schadenfreude and ingroup identification: The sometimes happy thing about a poor economy and death,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 45, 2009, pp. 635–46.
“collective effervescence”: Jonathan Haidt, “Why We Celebrate a Killing,” New York Times, 7 May 2011.
“minimal group paradigm”: H. Tajfel, “Experiments in intergroup discrimination,” Scientific American, vol. 223, 1970, pp. 96–102.
“We can control the Schadenfreude”: The West Wing, “Disaster Relief,” season 5, episode 6, NBC, created by Aaron Sorkin, 5 November 2003.
“In one study, BlackBerry users”: J. W. Ouwerkerk et al., “When we enjoy bad news about other groups: A social identity approach to out-group Schadenfreude,” in Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, vol. 21.1, 2018, pp. 214–32.
“she is the weaker and therefore the more vindictive sex”: Max Scheler, Ressentiment (1915), Milwaukee, Marquette, 1994, p. 15.
“very much of the removal of naughty kittens”: Daily Express, 21 March 1907.
“If you were my wife I’d give you poison”: quoted in Krista Cowman, “ ‘Doing Something Silly’: The uses of humour by the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903–1914,” International Review of Social History, vol. 52, 2007, pp. 259–74, 268.
“Every joke”: George Orwell, “Funny, But Not Vulgar” (1944), repr. in George Orwell, As I Please, S. Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), D. R. Godine, 1968, p. 184.