On The Social Element of Laughter. (part 5)
Up to this point, we’ve discussed how comic epiphanies can arise out of moments of apprehension or agitation. Fortunately for the sake of laughter, we live in a rich universe of anxieties and aggravations that we can mine for comedic purposes. Our brains are gifted with a remarkable ability to find new things to worry about, particularly when it comes to social life in modern society.
The same machinery built to identify threats and help you avoid troublesome situations could not be better suited to help you navigate the hazards of your social environment. By harnessing that same paralyzing sense of terror that scared your ancestors away from playing with fire or provoking bears, we’ve allowed ourselves the ability to police our own behaviors so that we’re well-mannered and keeping up with appearances. Anxiety is naturally fit to help you identify the people who pose a threat to your social status and help you avoid the situations that could endanger your social standing. It could prevent you from saying things uncouth and help make sure your relationships are preserved and your behaviors are in line with social expectations.
You should be thankful you have a sense of shame that gives you the good sense not to come into the office naked or go around making inappropriate sexual advances. By encouraging you to respect social hierarchies and decorum, a sense of anxiety could save you from suffering a number of serious consequences, like being ridiculed, deprived of resources, or even imprisoned, banished or killed.
And just like with traditional threats, you would want to develop and fine-tune your sense of anxiety by learning from the situations that brought about risk to your well being.
If you were exposed as a liar in front of people whose opinion you cared about, you’d know that some trust in you was lost. Your career might suffer and your personal relationships might be damaged. Although this would not be a pleasant memory, by holding on to a sense of dread over the situation, you’d caution yourself not to commit an offense like that again. After a certain number of these kinds of soul crushing epiphanies, you’d condition yourself to keep up with expectations.
On the other hand, you also wouldn’t want to overestimate the amount of risk present in a situation. You’d want to know if your concerns were overblown. You wouldn't want the range of opportunities available to you to be restricted due to an inflated sense of risk about something, nor would you want to overreact to something trivial.
In the same way that laughter might help a person downgrade their assessment of risk in a certain situation in nature, it also could help a person identify social situations that are similarly free of risk. For example, you wouldn’t want to start a fight with a toddler if he inadvertently shoved you as he was walking by. You wouldn’t want to go run off and kill yourself if you spilled mustard on your shirt at a work meeting. If you felt threatened by someone, you might avoid them or monitor your behavior around them. But if you saw them do something embarrassing and humiliate themselves, the degree to which you were intimidated by them would be immediately recalculated. Unencumbered by apprehension about that person, you’d open yourself up to an expanded range of opportunities. If you saw a person you were previously intimidated by make self-deprecating jokes to make themselves appear less threatening, you might reappraise their level of approachability and thus improve your well being by engaging in more interactions with them.
And just like with experiences that seemed frightening, but turned out to be false alarms, you’d also want some way to interrupt the fear-conditioning process and stop yourself from developing a traumatic memory of a situation after you discovered your anxieties about a situation were unfounded. A misinformed social anxiety could cause you to avoid situations that needn’t be avoided. It could cause you to censor yourself from saying things that are perfectly acceptable to say or restrain yourself from doing things that are perfectly acceptable to do. Altogether it could hamper your ability to make appropriate decisions about your social interactions.
If you found yourself in a situation that initially brought about anxiety or caused you to feel a great deal of shame as if you’d actually done something wrong, but you later came to realize that the consequences of the episode were not as substantial as you’d originally calculated, you might start to see the event in a more humorous light. If no harm came out of the situation, there is no danger we need to be conditioned to fear. There is no important information needed to be integrated into our decision making process, so any anxiety about the matter would be best laughed away.
You could take just about any situation that seemed like a cause for apprehension or uneasiness, and to the extent that it brought about a credible risk to your social standing, you would cringe, and to the extent that you realized the anxiety were overblown, you would laugh.
This would largely depend upon the context the experience were revisited in. If you peed your pants at summer camp or if you went on a long rant about how you hate a certain dog breed to a person you later found out had that exact dog breed, you might cringe at the thought of being in a situation like that again. But you could tell a story like this to a friend in a different setting and know that your friend wouldn’t change their opinion of you. There are certain ways you could frame a story like that so that it wouldn’t seem like you did anything worthy of having your reputation tarnished.
It’s also in our best interest to communicate as quickly as possible that we don’t feel threatened by someone so that we can avoid conflict. In 1902, English Psychologist James Sully suggested that one of laughter’s greatest benefits to us is that it would allow us to communicate that we’re not offended. As we mentioned earlier in this essay, the physical indications of amicability, like relaxed jaw and body posture likely serve on some level as a form of social feedback to indicate that one is not threatened and not prepared to engage in any kind of hostile response. Furthermore, if laughter prevents aggressive episodes from being uploaded to the brain as traumatic memories, it would also be an indication that a person isn’t going to hold a grudge or plan a retaliation attack. Sully noted that it would be especially important to communicate that we don’t feel threatened during circumstances that have the most potential for conflict, for example when coming into contact with foreign people or when someone violates some sort of social etiquette. This, he said, is why we laugh when a foreigner breaks one of our customs or when a child says something out of line. Laughter would be a way of announcing the harmlessness of the breach of etiquette. In Sully’s words, to proclaim that the offense was “so trifling that we do not feel called upon to judge [it] severely.” By filling our social interactions with laughter, we would grant permission for any minor instances of social friction, and confirm to each other that we’re still on good terms so that we can proceed with more sophisticated and intimate social interactions.