There are a lot of popular ideas that some people might say are truisms, but I just don’t get. (Of course, you could be excused for thinking that this is somehow my fault, that I am just more simple-minded than most people, but that is besides the point. ..)
One such idee fixe is that laughter is a defense mechanism. I grew up hearing this. With some things, it you hear them often enough, you start believing them. But with this one, I had my doubts, even from very early on (when I was nine or ten). I suppose I may have been influenced by the fact that I already knew that a smile makes a lousy umbrella. In any case, I got a bit obsessed with the whole idea, so I was very happy to discover that my brother had a character flaw which made it possible to put the theory to the test. What he would do, on a relatively regular basis, was insult or otherwise bother some bigger kid, wait until he was mad enough to threaten with bodily harm, then start laughing. This allowed me to gather proof – from a safe distance - that nine times out of ten, laughter offers absolutely no protection against fists.
Another is the idea that laughter is the best medicine. To me, it is more like a sickness. Not only is it contagious (something that sit-com producers abuse shameless by sticking a laugh-track under just about anything), it can be really dangerous. If laughter really were a medicine, the list of counterindications would read something like “do not use in case of cracked lips, broken ribs, ruptured spleen or appendix, collapsed lung “ … the list is almost endless! And it can even be dangerous is a different way, namely when you laugh at inappropriate moments, like I demonstrated above. Some more examples of moments when it might be risky to laugh: while receiving a serious reprimand from your boss, at the most tragic or romantic point in a movie (don’t laugh, I was once attacked by a bag-wielding old lady for committing this heinous offense), or when getting an accidental (and completely unwelcome) peek at your ex-wife’s new boyfriend’s private parts … personally, I also think it is inappropriate to laugh at accidents, but I know there is a whole branch of media industry that now depends on that sort of psuedo-comedy, so I guess very few people will agree with me on that.
Of course, we now know that laughter releases all kinds of feel—good chemicals like endorphins. So I’m thinking, why run all those risks, and do all that hard work (laughter actually requiries a lot of coordination, and involves a lot of different muscle groups) when you could just inject yourself with these chemicals. Or better yet, take them as pills. I suppose the most important risk there is addiction, but that doesn’t scare me much.
Which brings me to what I find most interesting about the above-mentioned idees fixes, namely that they both link laughter to fear, in a few short steps: defense – danger – fear, and medicine – sickness – fear. Which is of course one really important aspect of laughter: how it (like whistling when it’s dark) helps us conquer fear. And conquering fear is all about emotional control.
I am not too good at this, but once in a while I do succeed in getting though otherwise potentially very distressing situations by imagining how I (or others) will laugh about it afterwards. This is so useful that I have made a resolve to develop this skill.
More about this in a future post ...
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