Laughing is a lot of fun. It’s certainly one of the more pleasant ways to spend the brief period of time granted to us between the messy poles of birth and death. In the hierarchy of the body’s natural processes it beats hiccuping and yawning, but places just below sleeping.
However, the laugh is one of the human’s most manipulative faculties, used almost exclusively in social situations. Nobody ever laughs when they are on their own. Try it. Isolate yourself in your room and watch your favourite sitcom. You won’t laugh. It’s still funny, but you won’t laugh, because there is nobody to laugh with. The laugh, then, far from being an innocuous outburst of happiness, is in fact a very shady little enterprise indeed.
Monitoring your laugh can help you to decipher how you feel about people if, like me, you aren’t in tune with your ‘feelings’. If somebody says something really witty, causing eruptions of mirth among your cohorts while leaving you curiously unmoved, then you probably don’t like them that much. You probably hate their stupid, smug, oh-so-clever face. Similarly, if someone comes out with a weak or slightly racist joke and you collapse into a fit of hysterics, you probably want to give them special touches.
Laughing is an excellent way to make friends. A laugh shared between two people can forge a bond that would take hours to form through boring things like talking. But one must always be wary of a person who laughs too much. There is a distinct possibility that they may be a mentalist. Or a demon.
Everybody has a regular laugh and a real laugh. The real laugh only occurs when something extraordinarily humorous happens, like a friend failing utterly at a task, or Jimmy Carr getting hit by a car – really layered stuff; universal comic-gold. Regular laughs can be attractive, they can light up someone’s face and make them look beautiful, and they can sound like bubbly joy distilled into sound waves. But real laughs are never alluring – they involve face crumpling, a purple complexion infesting the face and a sound akin to a warthog’s death rattle. Real laughs are no joke.
There is a myth surrounding humorous people, suggesting that they possess the ability to ‘laugh someone right into bed’. I can pretty confidently say that this has never happened in the entire history of the world. Jesters are not sexy. Neither are clowns. Even on a night on the town when one is firing out witticisms left, right and centre, one will always find that the opposite sex’s chuckles fade off into the gloom accompanied by stoic man-people with funny bones squeezed dry between bulging muscles. One goes home, alone, watches a comedy DVD, and doesn’t laugh. And it’s not funny.
