Have We Forgotten To Laugh?
Yesterday morning, I stumbled across a video called Greg's Laughing Club. It was filmed in a park. A group of people stood around and, for reasons that were not immediately obvious to me, started laughing. Not polite laughter. Not the little “ha-ha” we sometimes offer when someone tells a joke that isn't particularly funny. They were laughing with their whole bodies. For a couple of minutes, they simply laughed their guts out. Then they stopped. Rested. And did it again. I found the whole thing rather ridiculous. And then I found myself laughing at them. Which, naturally, led to me trying it myself. The first round felt completely absurd. There I was, standing alone, deliberately laughing at absolutely nothing. But something strange happened. By the second round, I wasn't thinking about how silly I looked anymore. I just felt… lighter. That got me thinking. When did we become so serious? Think about a child. They don't need a reason to laugh. A funny face. A funny sound. Someone falling into a pile of cushions. And when they laugh, they don't seem particularly concerned about whether the laugh is attractive, appropriate, dignified, or productive. They just laugh. Somewhere along the way, many of us might have misplaced that ability. We have meetings to attend, bills to pay, messages to answer, calendars to manage and a thousand tiny things competing for our attention. Even our relaxation seems to have become something we schedule. Perhaps that is why a really good laugh feels almost like a temporary escape from being an adult. For a few seconds, the machinery stops. You forget yourself. And perhaps that is one of the reasons laughter has always belonged so naturally to human gatherings. Watch a dinner table when something genuinely funny happens. One person laughs. Someone else catches it. Then another. But everyone is laughing together. There is something wonderfully primitive about that. Just another human being doing something ridiculous. And perhaps there is another reason laughter matters. Have you noticed that the person with the most natural laugh often becomes the person everyone wants to be around? Not necessarily the funniest person. Just the person who laughs freely. Their laughter tells everyone else: You can relax here. That may be one of the quiet gifts of laughter. It doesn't only make us feel lighter. It gives other people permission to feel lighter around us too. And certainly nobody needs to start standing in a park laughing at 7 a.m. because Bob told them to. But maybe, somewhere in the middle of this wonderfully complicated life, we could allow ourselves a little more of the thing that costs absolutely nothing. A ridiculous joke. A friend who still makes you laugh the way you did twenty years ago. The memory of something that went terribly wrong and became hilarious only years later. Or perhaps just laughing so hard with someone that, for a moment, neither of you can remember what you were worried about. Who in your family and friends has the best laugh! Could it be you? Happy Saturday, Bob
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