.This chapter interrogates the reception of laughter in classical and ritual performance traditions of Keralam, focusing on how audience laughter reflects deeply embedded structures of caste, gender, and bodily normativity. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and performance analysis across Kutiyattam, Kathakali, and Teyyam, it examines how audience responses are shaped not merely by humour but by a complex interplay of social positioning, cultural codes, and affective distance. Laughter, particularly when directed at disabled, lower caste, or gendered bodies, becomes a marker of disfiguration—a form of othering that elicits amusement at the expense of empathy. Through case studies of figures such as the Vidushaka, Shurpanakha, Bheeru, Paniyan, and Bappiriyan, the chapter reveals how performance spaces encode and reproduce hierarchies, even as they entertain. The laughter of spectators—whether delayed or immediate, politically indifferent or reactive—exposes the layered complicity of audiences in reinforcing social exclusions. The chapter ultimately questions the ethical boundaries of humour in performance, proposing a re-examination of the grammar of phalitham (comic delivery) in light of shifting sociopolitical sensibilities, and offering a nuanced framework to understand laughter not as a neutral affect but as a performative response that both reveals and regulates power.