Extract from George Melly's text in the museum touring exhibition catalogue 'Towards Laughter' (published 1993): "The 'Laughs' are both abstract and concrete, but always physical. They are sometimes witty, sometimes tragic, but always serious. Maggi has pursued the laugh as Bacon hunted the scream."

Maggi Hambling's words in an interview with Dr Judith Collins in the same catalogue: "I took on the subject of the laugh directly in October 1990, during [...] my first show at a commercial gallery, when the recession had begun, and doom and gloom were everywhere, and the only thing to do was laugh. One feels very vulnerable, or at least I feel very vulnerable, when I have a show of my work on. So I took on the challenge of the subject, and began with ink and watercolour to try to paint the laugh."

In 1993, the 'Towards Laughter' museum exhibition opened at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, before touring to several museums in England and finishing at Barbican Centre, London.