“Laugh” is a word that is used in everyday life to- more often than not- describe the audible, outward reaction to happiness or being tickled physically or by jokes. Something like that. However, interestingly but not unexpectedly, “laugh” begins to appear much more frequently in Lucifer’s Hammer after the comet hits. 26 results, 22 of which occur after the Hammer’s landing, and 24 of which are used to express bitterness, hysteria, and/or sarcasm. This word is not excluded to just one or two characters, but most applicable to the characters who survive the initial landing of Hammer.
“Automatically she brushed at her hair and her skirt before going outside, and she felt an impulse to laugh. She choked it down. If she started that, she wouldn’t stop.” (230)
“Johnny’s laugh was bitter…” (288)
“So that was it. End of the line. Tim sat beside the fire and began to laugh, softly at first, then in rising hysteria…” (388)
“He wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t…” (462)
“Deke Wilson’s laugh was bitter…” (501)
“Tim had an impulse to laugh, but he didn’t.” (532)
“Now everybody he loved was dead. The Hammer had got them all. He felt a crazy impulse to laugh: America’s record was still perfect. Not one astronaut lost on space duty…” (614)
It’s clear that the authors use this word to emphasize the terror and tension that the comet’s landing has impounded into the plot. They redundantly abuse “laugh” to create irony within passages, writing scene after scene of people laughing- or at least, having the sudden, innate urge to laugh- in sake of panic and hysteria and in desperation to relieve the overwhelming new world around them, with their comfortable old world dissipating before them.
This was a great word to focus on, and your findings remind me of the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote insightfully about the destabilizing power of laughter, especially hysterical laughter. I think that’s because laughter is what you could call a “threshold” activity, which usually has positive associations. But all it takes is a slight deviation from the norm to thrust the action into the realm of the marginalized, the uncanny, the disturbing.