Today's Secular Sunday conversation discussed Laughter and Humor. Oddly enough, it was fairly dark.
We started out by bringing up the point that most evolutionary biologists believe that laughter developed as a coping mechanism, but Francie quickly pointed out that there are all sorts of laughter. People chimed in by talking about nervous laughter, joyous laughter, and even (later) scornful laughter - these are all things that represent extreme displays of emotion, but aren't necessarily coming from the same place. Additionally, there are culturally specific responses that involve laughter. Schadenfreude, for instance, might seem callous, but many of us have experienced it. Though, as Francie pointed out, the context of this is very important - laughing at the misfortune of someone who has seemingly earned their "reward" is inherently more humorous than someone who is helpless or - in our estimation - undeserving.
What might cause amusement in certain situations could easily cause stress in others. In many countries, laughter is seen as a way to add levity to a difficult situation - some westerners have a very difficult time adapting to this. Especially, when it appears that someone is laughing at a misfortune that we've suffered.
Obviously, laughter is one of few external "extreme" displays (as opposed to smirking, etc.) of emotion that we have at our disposal, so it is going to have to pull double or triple or whatever duty - to wit, laughter isn't just laughter.
A few people said that slapstick is not their cup of tea and more likely to make them uncomfortable than cause them laughter.
Obviously, tickling, for instance, is a display of a kind of distress. This might have developed so that children had an instinctual and audible reaction to being touched - for safety's sake.
Bob pointed out that different cultures find different things funny. Betty pointed out that at times, forcing laughter can have a "fake it till you make it" sort of effect on people. Even if a situation isn't funny, laughing can help us rise above it. Cheryl then produced a study from Mt. Sinai hospital that showed how many positive physiological effects laughter can have: relief of stress to better functioning of many of the body's systems. Additionally, the article mentioned that, while uncommon, laughter has had some bad side effects - most notably, monocular blindness and syncope (fainting). I would very much like to be the comedian who could say that they caused someone to go blind from laughter - can you imagine?
We also talked about maturity and laughter - what seems funny to us at a young age often doesn't after some time. We talked about the maturing of comedy in pop-culture. The early episodes of South Park, for instance, we completely scatology. The newer episodes, while still having some similarly low-brow stuff, often have political and social commentary. While we did enjoy talking about Charlie Chaplin's Hard Times and The Great Dictator, it seems that a lot of the mass media entertainments have become more sophisticated - Sitcoms, with plenty of exceptions, have to be relate-able, humorous, and, at certain levels, compelling in order to keep an audience. As terrible as some of them are, comparing, say, The Big Bang Theory to Leave It to Beaver, shows a lot more ability on the writers' parts.
We talked about humor not being a coping mechanism anymore - just as the desire to accumulate resources for survival eventually gives way to greed in some people. Humor cannot entirely be attributed to a coping mechanism. We talked about situational comedy and the subversion of expectations in things like the Zucker Brothers' Airplane! and Top Secret. We brought up that as our society has matured, Chaplin's words, that life is a tragedy in close up and comedy in long shot, makes a lot of sense in terms of some darkly comedic jokes about some of the greater tragedies in human history.
This led to a discussion of the current presidential administration and its need to be taken seriously. We bantered about whether or not Trump has ever been responding jovially to a quip at his expense - something that even George W. Bush found a way to do. I pointed out that Trump's brand of humor is often the kind of thing that would make the average person sick. Take, for instance, his imitation of the handicapped reporter. There are people out there that, no doubt, found that to be the kind of thing that he "has the balls to say". It is, however, humor of a certain type.
This brought us through another round of the cultural appropriateness of certain types of humor, and, eventually, to the point where we talked about politically correctness, the book Infidel, the horror of silencing protest in the name of not offending people, and our discussion for next time.
Joseph Lantz felt - and for good reason - that our comedy discussion was a tad depressing. So, he pointed out that KFC has released this in time for Mother's Day. Thank you Joe. That's amazing.
I hope to see you all there! Have a fantastic week!
