Does one “laugh out of enjoyment” or “laugh of enjoyment”?

Question

Does one "laugh out of enjoyment while watching a movie"? Or does one "laugh from enjoyment"? Or "laugh of enjoyment"?

Answer 1

The prepositions out of, from, and of are all used indicate the source or cause of something. You could justify using any of them. However, I don't think they are equal.

• laugh of enjoyment - This is probably the weakest choice due to numerous uses of the word of. Since of can also indicate possession, composition, association, etc., it takes a bit more processing to determine the meaning of the phrase.

• laugh from enjoyment - This works well. It is immediately clear that the source of the laugh is enjoyment.

• laugh out of enjoyment - This is a very good phrase. It indicates that enjoyment is the source of the laugh. Also the phrase out of implies that the enjoyment is internal and the laugh is the external result of that enjoyment.

Answer 2

The verb to laugh is used (at least in writing) with all of these prepositions. Using this NGram, you can see that to laugh from and to laugh out of are more common:

Some examples of both, as given in Google Books, are:

to laugh out of:

My first instinct was to laugh out of appreciation for his planning.

Only to laugh out of spite, only to laugh.

to laugh from:

Most adults have lost, too, the ability to laugh from sheer happiness;

Humanity ceased to laugh from the fourth century on

When you beg them to imagine away every feeling of laughter and of tendency to laugh from their consciousness of the ludicrousness of an object

As you can see, using from has more interpretations such as being used to denote a point in time. However, both out of and from can be used to denote why a person is laughing. In context, either would be acceptable (a person would correctly interpret from or out of to give the reason for laughing).