Laughter, Except As A Vulnerability Thing
Laughter, Except As A Vulnerability Thing
Developing a sense about humor
Welcome to Only Child! Usually, new posts come to your inbox bi-weekly on Sundays but this one got away from me for a day because I couldn’t get Wi-Fi at the airport :(
But I have some thoughts about laughter this week so hopefully that’ll raise spirits and make up for the lost time.
I love laughing. Everybody does, I think, unless you’re like a freaky little weirdo or something. Laughter flood us with glee and makes our bodies shake from within. Here are a few things that will always make me laugh:
People doing exaggerated imitations of each other
Imagining people with just the top of their head shaved bald
I’ve thought about why I like these styles of humor and just come up with more questions. If I ask my friends why they have their sense of humor, they don’t know. No one really has answers. No one even likes talking about it. Try asking someone why they like a joke and they’ll shrug and say, “I dunno, it was just funny.”
People—including me, sometimes—just hate analyzing jokes, let alone the concept of humor. We don’t clearly know why it exists besides a couple of theories that haven’t gathered very much traction. The science is shaky; the research is thin. Humor’s just sort of this thing we experience and enjoy but whose nature we’re discouraged from questioning. Even the word “humor” is a super outdated term that used to mean bodily fluids whose composition varied between people and influenced their personalities.
I did, however, find one piece of research that was interesting. One of the theories that goes around is called the “benign-violation theory,” which basically says that we find things funny if they break our expectation for how things should be—if they benignly violate our outlook on life. I find Eric Andre so funny, for example, because he’s so aggressively chaotic in a world that resists chaos, so when he arrives at a karate dojo dressed as a jester gigolo to deliver a pizza ball, I completely lose it. It violates my sense of reality in a way that’s not dangerous—if he entered the dojo and started threatening people with a weapon, on the other hand, then that wouldn’t be funny. It’d be serious, and you probably tensed up just imagining it.
Nowadays, we don’t have the same kinds of threats. Instead, it’s more socialized, where sometimes we fake a laugh to fit in with the group. In a very broad sense, the evolution of laughter reminds me of fashion, where it starts off to serve a functional purpose, but once that’s satisfied, it ends up taking on a new role. Now, the purpose of laughter has become implicit, where the whole point is to signal that you instinctively think like the group. On one hand, I can’t really fault anyone for naysaying a joke-explainer: if everyone in a room, including me, is laughing uncontrollably and one person’s just staring calmly out the window (or vice-versa), then something’s off, and I don’t trust this guy. But on the other, sometimes I’ve been that guy.
Maybe this is all obvious and never needed to be explained. I’m curious because I laugh pretty often, sometimes loudly, sometimes nervously, sometimes alone when remembering a funny joke, and they all feel different. Sometimes I’ll laugh at something no one else in the room finds funny, which is embarrassing because you don’t wanna be the guy with the misplaced sense of reality. But then I remember what my old chinless ninth-grade biology teacher told my class. “You should never make fun of somebody’s laugh, because it’s one of the purest things they can do.” He was a big guy with curly gray hair whose own laugh exploded out of him in waves. He was right. Laughing is stretching our understanding of reality. It is a very vulnerable thing. Don’t make fun of somebody’s laugh, or what they laugh at, or how they look when they laugh. Or else I will laugh at you…PUBLICLY.
But to wrap this up. I wanna know more about what you guys think is funny and why. A style of joke, a TV show, a friend, a meme, a cooking blog, a detergent brand, or whatever that will consistently make you laugh so I can finally just figure it out already. Thank u :)
Other Things Of Note
I asked some of my friends how they'd describe their sense of humor. Here’s a loose collection of their responses.
Absurd / shock humor.
Fart jokes.
Specific jokes about being human that apply to everyone. Like that Louis C.K. joke about how putting your socks on in the morning is the most difficult thing to do.
When someone tells a story in just the right way and hits all the comedic beats.
Seeing our friend Saumil drool.
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—Chuckry Vengadam (@churrthing)
Any scene with Jared Dunn from Silicon Valley. I usually don't find pitiful characters funny (thinking specifically of how I couldn't stomach a lot of the jokes made at the expense of Jerry Gergich from Parks and Rec), but something about the way Jared delivers lines about his tragic, unfathomably out-of-pocket past so matter-of-factly just really gets to me. Also - Dr. Glaucomflecken's Tik Toks. Dr. Glaucomflecken is an ophthalmologist who became famous on MedTwitter for his irreverent Tik Toks that poke fun at the stereotypes of different medical specialists or the actually very unfunny struggles of exhausted, overworked, exploited, verbally abused, disillusioned medical students.
I think things are funny when they’re true. Which is weird to say, but for example I saw this TikTok the other day that was like “next time a Virgo talks shit about u just ask them how their stomach is doing... it’s probably hurting rn” which was so funny to me bc one of my good friends in a Virgo and she’s notorious for having stomach issues lol. That’s a very niche example but those are the kinds of things that make me laugh really hard.