In Time
Enough for Love, Robert Heinlein dropped a significant
remark about laughter. “When apes learn to laugh,
they’ll be people.” Laughter is what makes
us human. But there are different kinds of laughter,
and different ways of being human. The best kind of
laughter reinforces our deeper or richer humanity,
creating a sense of empathy with others. Other types
of laughter, on the other hand, create division and
express what we recognize as inhumanity.
Some laughter
responds to clever wordplay, sharp irony, unexpected
consequences, and, of course, a touch of warmth; it
reflects shared cohesion or mutual understanding.
Other kinds of laughter violate these norms and criteria,
suggesting a propensity for causing discomfort or
harm. Such laughter is an expression of malevolence
and sadistic violence, of mental unbalance or even
outright madness.
Nervous
laughter and phatic laughter are a rather different
genre of expostulation, having nothing to do with
humor or aggression. They are forms of deflecting
attention from ill-at-ease-ness or what we might call
flow-stall, that is, when a thought or phrase embarrassingly
fails to complete itself via misspeaks, accidental
interruptions, and brain freeze.
The timbre
or quality of laughter is also important. The laughter
of certain public figures is famously a symptom of
some form of cerebral vertigo. One thinks of the high-pitched
shriek of Tucker Carlson, a cross between the screech
of a howler monkey in distress and a badly oiled gate
hinge. There is definitely something wrong there.
Kamala Harris for her part has become notorious for
what has been described as a cackle, a disquieting
morphic meld between the creepy vocalizations of a
hyena and the readle-eak of a grackle, with maybe
a chicken thrown into the pot for good measure. We
should be thankful she does not yelp, bark, roar or
grunt, or the force of her laughter might then be
threatening rather than comical or immiserating. I
have a friend who laughs like a magpie in a belfry,
which makes it impossible to take even the good things
he says seriously, and compels me to wonder about
his internal balance. Nail-on-chalkboard laughter
is often taken as a symptom of incipient derangement,
and perhaps rightly so.
We have
many qualifiers for different kinds of laughter: hearty
laughter, sarcastic laugher, cruel laughter, evil
laughter, and so on. The heh heh of the Grinch stealing
Christmas signifies the joy of causing pain or discomfort,
the gritch of motiveless sadism. The guffaw or vocal
explosives of Mafia goon laughter in films indicates
the pleasure of subcortical ferocity. The peals and
arc-like gales or insidious titters is the stock in
trade of the infernal demon. The belly-laugh of the
good-natured companion is the Falstaffian sonic surround
of camaraderie. One thinks of the Jewish expression,
carried over into many other languages: das mentsh
trakht un got lakht (man proposes and God laughs).
But what is the laughter of God? Is it affectionate?
Is it imperial? Here we admit our ignorance.
In her
study of Jewish humor, No Joke, Ruth Wisse
speaks of laughter’s salvific properties, a
special instance of humor that releases a special
kind of laughter. Jewish jokes and the laughter they
provoke, typically self-deprecating, have multiple
functions: they are expressions of humility and modesty;
a recognition of the absurdity of the world, and a
coping mechanism “transmuting humiliation, subjugation,
and dread into funniness.” It’s a bad
joke that induces a good joke, the laughter of incredulity
and the preposterous fun of verbal, half-unserious
self-immolation. It is redemptive laughter in the
midst of adversity. As Freud marvelled in Jokes and
their Relation to the Unconscious, “I do not
know whether there are many other instances of a people
making fun to such a degree of its own character.”
One cannot
go any further unless one asks what all these species
of laughter have in common. This brings up the more
genetic question about laughter, in short, what is
this weird, cascading outburst in the first place?
We are all, at least to some extent, Tucker Carlson
or Kamala Harris. When one becomes clinically aware
of laughter, one realizes the absolute eerieness of
our condition as something other than mere animals
capable of some degree of thought.
Gelotology—which
AI confuses with Gelatology or the making of ice cream,
and which is unintentionally funny in itself—is
the science of laughter, a recognized field of study
featuring many excellent researchers. In my estimation,
one of the best books on the subject is Scott Weems’
HA! Weems views laughter as arising from a contest
or squabble in the brain—tension in the mind
is probably a better description—accompanied
by surprise and joy at the moment of reconciliation.
Max Nieuwdorp
in The Power of Hormones provides a clinical
analysis of endocrinological paradigms largely in
the support of laughter in the quarrel between happy
endorphins and angry cortisols.
William
Fry in Sweet Madness investigates humor and
laughter from a transactional standpoint, as something
that is most effective and vivid in social contexts
to establish a feeling of complicity or simple entertainment
for a society of equals that binds them together.
He does not, unfortunately, examine the mechanics
of laughter in profound detail.
In The
Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler sees laughter
as arising from a “collision of matrices”
or frameworks that release tension in staccato gusts
of breath, a clash of referential schemata or cognitive
grids he calls “bisociative events.” It
is a creative leap “that gives rise to new and
startling perceptions and glimpses of reality.”
Laughter detaches us from disturbing feelings, releasing
stress or agitation or psychic pressure in a burst
of innocent humor, followed by an access of relief.
These puffs, blasts and eruptions of air and CO2 from
the lungs, this collapsing diaphragm allowing for
a fresh intake of oxygen, helps to restore equilibrium
after the stress of what we might call anxious patience,
waiting for the punch line, hovering before the contrast
represented by the unexpected or the eventual and
yet sudden fulfillment of desire. The hidden metaphor
is that of a tightly coiled spring.
Like the
flow of tears, which no other creature shares, and
which can be intimately associated with laughter and
caused by the same phenomena, laughter is both a mechanism—analogically,
a tightly wound spring packed with kinetic energy—and
a spiritual or pneumatic (quite literally) mystery
of attitude, flair and conscious anticipation, a numinous
quality that connects us to something other than the
physical. Nobody really knows what it is, but it is
surely an imprint of something alien and unsettling.
Spend
a little time just observing oneself or others caught
up in a snort or a squall of laughter, the throwing
back of the head, the shaking of the physique, the
cataract of clipped or amorphous sound that has no
relation to speech, and simply register what is occurring.
One should feel a state of bafflement infused with
self-consciousness—and at the same time discover
something rather astounding about ourselves. The bizarre,
alveolar expulsion of breath, which seems frankly
grotesque when we become aware of it, is an uncanny
mix of the natural and the unnatural, a sign that
we are both in and out of the predictable, customary
world. Whether benign or foolish or spiteful, it resembles
a form of dyskinesia, the flux of involuntary gestures,
almost a kind of disorder.
But laughter
may also be the incursion of the transcendent realm
or dimension, of the strangely noetic, whether admirable
or discreditable, into the material element of our
being. The phenomenon comes from elsewhere, as if
from a region of existence that Saint Paul describes
in his letter to the Ephesians as the realm of the
Spirit, that is, of Powers and Fiends from whom we
descend in equal parts. It is not an abstract concept
but an authentic reality. Angels sing. Demons howl.
And we laugh.
