Have you ever been in a place where you’re not supposed to laugh, which means it’s now your life’s purpose for the next five minutes? We all have.
Like, when you’re getting chewed out by your boss, being romantic, or attending a funeral.
My mom hated it when I laughed when she was yelling at me because it meant I didn’t take her seriously.
Once, when I was ten, one of the neighborhood kids was hassling me while I was in my backyard. He was yelling from another neighbor’s yard, calling me names, and generally being a jerk. He was six, though, so I couldn’t just chase him down and beat him up.
Instead, I raised one of my fingers at him, but not my middle finger — I flipped my pinky at him. No really! I knew what the middle finger meant, and I was already a virtuoso at using it. But I decided he wasn’t worth the energy of a full Jersey Salute.
At that very moment, my mom came outside and saw me. She yelled, "Erik! Don’t ever flip your middle finger at anyone."
"I didn’t!" I protested. "I flipped my pinky at him."
"Well, you shouldn’t do that either," she said, not letting up. What do you do to a child who didn’t actually do a bad thing, but knew what the bad thing meant, and did something like it? In my mom’s book, it meant full steam ahead, whether he did it or not.
"But he flipped his actual middle finger at me!" I said.
My mom was not a believer in an eye for an eye, or a finger for a finger, for that matter. This was not a justification for firing the digitus impudicus.
She said, "I don’t care if he raised his big toe at you!"
Uh-oh.
If I laughed while I was getting yelled at, it was going to get worse. And now I had the image of this kid leaning back, kicking up his leg, and flipping his big toe at me, hopping on the other foot to keep it there longer.
I thought I would burst, but the harder I tried not to laugh, the worse it got. I did everything I could to hold a poker face, but I didn’t know how to play poker, so that failed.
"What’s so funny?" my mom demanded.
"You said you didn’t care if he raised his big toe at me," I said, letting a cautious smile play on my face. "That sounded funny?" I said it as a question to test the waters.
"No, it didn’t!"
Nope, the waters were definitely still choppy. Mom never thought anything was funny when I was in trouble, which was a lot of the time. "Don’t ever give anyone the finger again! Ever!" she said, and stormed back into the house.
Can I give him the big toe instead? I thought. I knew better than to say it out loud.
Turns out there’s a reason I couldn’t help laughing. Researchers at the University of Göttingen in Germany recently discovered what I could have told you nearly 50 years ago: The more you try to suppress laughter, the worse it gets.
Even if you force yourself not to smile, your brain still thinks about the funny thing — like flipping your big toe at someone — which intensifies your urge to laugh. And it gets even worse when you hear someone else laugh.
In fact, according to a psychology study my dad (a retired psych professor) once did, we’re more likely to laugh when someone else laughs.
This is why we laugh at a funeral: We know we’re not supposed to, but that only makes whatever your friend said even funnier.
You fight the urge to laugh, and it gets worse. So you try to think of something to distract your brain from the funny thing, but your friend is giggling like a maniac next to you, so the urge to laugh is even greater.
And when you can’t fight it, you look around for something visually distracting, only to accidentally see that video of the guy controlling a robot with a motion capture suit who makes the robot kick him in the groin.
So, you sit there, shoulders shaking, tears streaming down your face, pretending like you’re grieving the loss of your great-aunt Selma, who you never really knew, but you’re only there because your mom made you go, even though she never liked Selma because when she was a girl, Selma always pinched her arms and said she was putting on weight.
But if anyone ever gives you a dirty look or says something when you’re in the throes of your "grief," take your shoe and sock off, and flip them the big toe.
Now who’s laughing?
Photo credit: thisismyurl (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.