Laughter

Captions to the Cartoons We Live

What if the primal form of communication used by cells with one another was laughter. I don’t mean that all organisms laugh, but rather that the very same rules which make a laugh what it is could also govern the simplest form of communication within an organism. In the following essay I consider the fact that a laugh is both a conduit of meaning-bearing signals as well as a signal; its form is amorphous and capable of carrying incredible richness and subtleties of meaning.

Strangely, laughter is nearly digital. Laughs may be silent, a giggle or a guffaw, but they display more than any other emotion a tendency to be ON or OFF. At least in ourselves we can recognize this ON/OFF characteristic in laughter more readily than any other emotion.. ..except perhaps when we’re otherwise “turned on” and our physical structure has become somewhat altered. But let’s not get into that.

Anyway, it has long occurred to me that perhaps all meaningfulness works this way and that laughter is our clue to the rules of a universal check-sum, and to the laws of tokens that pass large structures around the living rings of our senses... within us as individuals and without us, in those pulsations of meaning which exist among living communities of people.

RISIOLOGY

The Logic of Laughter

I’ve taken laughter seriously for nearly 25 years, ever since this fellow wandered into Nick’s Bar at college. He laught at anything, and smackt you on the back while he did -- and darn if what he was laughing at wasn’t worth laughing at after all. The world is skewed, and wobbles on its axis.

Take laughs for example. They can be catching - (but not as catching as yawns). They can be signals requesting acknowledgment (but not like a slap on the back that cannot be ignored). Laughs can be courteous, but empty. Laughs can be evil. And laughs can be nervous-blurted-anxious-embarrassed-belly-silent-psychopathetic-mad-yuckyuck.

While I took laughs seriously and performed a detailed lobotomy of the sound phenomena and causal deliberata of the laugh - ahem, :: “the risiology” itself - I found no effect whatever to the brain. You may notice something odd about me, but not I. Laughing is no more or less exciting, spontaneous, lovable, livable, or fun if it is reduced to logic. Logic however is more exciting, spontaneous, lovable, and livable when reduced to the same skewed forms on which laughter is based. I shall not perform the aforementioned lobotomy.

Now I’ve read of cartloads of Robespierre’s victims being jostled through the streets of Paris to the guillotine, heartily laughing at the tribunals that condemned them. Say this is just nervousness and I’ll quibble. Nervous laughs have the overtones of bones sticking through - hearty laughs are all meat and flesh, the life-giving belly sort. Catch yourself chortling at someone’s ill-fitting clothes, or chortle at the helplessness of your next victim if your are a vampire. I would again suggest this is not what we associate with life-giving belly-laughs.

Rapid turnarounds in the world had left little safe ground, and these men and women were likely victims of some absurd twists in the language and logic and ideals of the French Revolution and its “Enlightenment.”

The prisoners in the cart may have used laughter as a release of stress - just a built-in simian tool to drive out fear. But from the description I read, these laughs were slaps on the back, camaraderie with the last moments and thoughts of life. Perhaps you can’t imagine hearty laughs as enduring moments of living, but I can. Laughs that endure and stride over human fragility. But perhaps you must picture a cartload full of soldiers in a vintage WWII film - Anthony Quinn and Kirk Douglas and Paul Muni to know what I mean.

On the other hand, think of casual conversations at a gas station, the Prime Minister’s house, or the PTA dinner, where laughing is more like social farting. And talk about social farting, if you are good at it, with the right company and lubrication, once you begin laughing you can stay laughing.

Laughs can change in intensity, timbre, chort and sneeze during extended vocal farting. The way different people are laughing also shows us something about the people themselves, and how they are processing the beans - different feelings about the perceptions accompanying laughing.

But how come we know Dracula’s laugh is evil? Or that Marketing Manager’s laugh is empty. And are the subtle razors and vacuums of sound common to us all? Can I recognize the vacant laugh of the Japanese or Nigerian Marketing Manager as well as the guy out selling some company’s image as something it is not?

Laugh-signals are like flags to let us know we’ve put down the clutch and dropped out of gear - that strict equivalences no longer hold. And the laugh is itself a rectifier -- processing signals and perceptions and putting them into an acceptable format. Audible rectifiers picking up and transmitting all the data that is skewed, that’s coming in on two channels at once. When something doesn’t want to make sense, when it has two or more definitions at once, when it can be read on both local and global levels or not read at all.. ..then it’s time to turn on the laugh.

Or, if we think we can localize a category of skewedness with whatever emotional black box we have conveniently at hand.

Yet laughter is the purest, simplest type of sensory processor. All the other emotional mechanisms (they’re called “little black boxes” or “gizmos”) except the scream, the cry, the whine, the wheedle, and the sniffle, are plainly contrived. For we all know emotions don’t count... since they are neither objective, quantifiably accurate, or strictly reproducible from one person to another.

So - given many dilemmas about the information processing models we hold in our word-processing minds, I believe a model built around laughter better reflects the nature of things.The artificial intelligent-heads can do all they want to represent reality slices on an E-prom or package the world view in a co-processor.But ask them how they laugh!As sharp as the guillotine may cut the world into flowcharts, nature will remind us how to reassemble it in a spirited human fashion.Laughter - in its thousands of faces -will always prove there is a world to wonder at and cry over.Whether we are banal or lusty, pure and simple, cynical or shrewd, we can love the feeling of laughter no less if we know it to be near and dear, and very, very real.