The article attempts to define laughter as a phenomenon bordering on biology and culture, and the projection of understanding ‘anthropology of laughter’ on the selected works that are representative of contemporary Russian prose. It analyzes the characteristics of different types of ‘created’ and ‘unplanned’ laughter, its features and manners in which it is constituted in small humorous literary genres (aphorism, anecdote, scene) by M. Zhvaniecky, and in medium and large genres – in the prose poem Moscow-Petushki by V. Jerofeyev and in V. Sorokin novels. In the modern Russian prose, as well as in non-literary reality, there are all possible kinds of laughter, from joyful to ruthless, ironic, from aesthetic to exceeding all standards, from philosophical to primitive. Contemporary prose writers expand the limits of laughter to some extent and enrich the manners of evoking it by, inter alia, ‘managing’ the elements that are obscene and shocking or absurd.