Why Do We Laugh at Jokes?
Laughter is Madness - King Solomon
Why do we laugh? Why do we find things funny? Why do we take so much pleasure in the absurd? These questions have long fascinated me. At first glance, you might assume these are straightforward questions about a perfectly normal, everyday activity. But as you plunge a little deeper down the rabbit hole, you begin to realize that humor might be the most peculiar thing there ever was.
Imagine you were raised in a humorless but otherwise identical society on some other planet and you were given one evening to study the people of Earth. Imagine you’re taking your tour and seeing all the things there are to see, and a little boy waddles up to you and asks, “Why did the absurdist fall into the well?” Naturally, you would take this for a serious question. You kneel down to the boy and put your hand on his shoulder. You begin to gather your thoughts on the subject and think of a couple of follow-up questions that you think will help clarify the problem he is trying to solve. But before you have a chance to open your mouth, the boy smiles and shouts, “Refrigerator!” and waddles off into the night. Very curious that the boy seems to find so much satisfaction in such a strange answer, you think. Perhaps his mind is unsound.
Let’s say you continue your tour of this strange planet and encounter a mime standing on a crate in the middle of a square. Why he pretends to be trapped in a box is beyond you. The fact that he’s pretending to pull a rope doesn’t seem particularly productive either. But the real mystery here is why such a buffoon has managed to gather a crowd of people around him who seem to genuinely enjoy this behavior. On your planet, such an absurd man would be locked away and sterilized.
What is more curious is the way these humans express their enjoyment. Rather than simply smile and nod, like a person on your planet would do to express her content with something, these humans make odd, high-pitched howls and grunts that come from the depths of their bellies.
Then let’s say that after this you go to dinner with some friendly humans you’ve met. The company is charming enough, and the meal is quite tasty, but when the waiter comes to collect your dish, he smiles and says, “Oh, you must have hated the meal, didn’t you?” even though it is very obvious you finished every morsel on your plate. This is where you begin to wonder if the curious behavior you’ve noticed is not limited to a few oddball characters, but is perhaps something that has infected the whole of the human race.
Soon enough you would see that Earth is an endless circus of absurdities. You would see people gluing nickels to the ground and hear people talking in accents that are very obviously not their own. You would see children wearing adult shoes. You would hear riddles that don’t make any sense. Toward the end of your journey, when you try to photograph the group of friends you’ve met, these humans, instead of staring vacantly at the camera like a sane person would, grin and make facial expressions that couldn’t possibly correspond to any emotion. Some of them bulge their eyes out, pull their mouths open wide with their pointer fingers and make horrible flailing movements with their tongues. Others make odd gestures with their fingers on top of each other’s heads.
At the end of your visit, you would ultimately have to conclude that human beings seem to achieve great pleasure in intentionally abandoning whatever intellect they possess—and that they are entirely incompatible with a rational society such as yours.
What we could never sufficiently convey to such a visitor is what it’s like to actually experience humor on a physical level—to know what funny feels like. Few feelings are stranger, and fewer still can make us feel so at home. Laughter can seize the body very powerfully, and yet it feels as light as a tickle. Paradoxically, it makes you feel as if you’re being attacked by relaxation.
Most striking about humor is the fact that not only is it usually purposeless, but it’s often intentionally counterproductive and completely opposite to the behaviors that a pragmatic people would value. We expect nothing but honesty from our friends, so why would we feel such pleasure hearing them sarcastically say the opposite of what they think? We value nothing more than health and safety, so why does it feel so good to see a perfectly nice man fall off his roof and land crotch first onto a fence?
Some of the things we laugh at are downright horrifying. A typical episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos might show a bridesmaid dancing on a table until one of the legs snaps and sends her across the room, or maybe a quick clip of a young gymnast twirling and flipping and then landing on her neck in such a way that causes an uproar of snorting laughter from the studio audience. Is this the most appropriate response?
I like to imagine hosting a show like that. I’d let the audience have a laugh at the young gymnast’s tumble. Then I’d let the tape keep playing so they see what horrible people they are for laughing. Perhaps it would show the young gymnast lying silently on the floor for several minutes, surrounded by a team of paramedics making concerned gestures to each other. Maybe it would show the stadium respectfully applauding as the coaches and medical staff try and load the girl’s mangled body onto a child-sized stretcher and carry her out of the arena.
Which brings us to yet another interesting curiosity of humor: how fickle it can be. The response to humor is the most boisterous of all emotions. You would be hard-pressed to find any art that induces an involuntary reaction as loud and contagious as laughter. Laughter is so powerful that it can infect an entire room, or completely possess a man even when he desperately wishes to contain himself. And yet the humor behind these laughs is so fragile that only the slightest misstep in timing, or a misplaced facial expression will send the humor crumbling down, even for a veteran comic in front of an audience thoroughly willing to laugh.
Another strange feature of jokes is that although they seem to thrive on attention, they cannot handle an ounce too much of it. If a joke goes on for only a few moments too long, it will start to spoil. Tell someone ‘I love you’ twice and it's only that much more endearing. But tell someone a joke twice and the response to the second is opposite to that of the first. Even when you hear an ingenious joke it has a way of slipping out of your memory so that when you're asked if you know any good jokes you draw a blank.