“The day was an utter waste” used to be a running joke between a friend and me.
It was a comment uttered with sincerity, and in the instant that followed we both laughed at the dark humor we found in it. Those words pieced together with sullen resignation, an almost biblical grandeur that could make a passer-by think an apocalypse had just occurred.
As often happens with these running jokes, I remember it many years later, but my friend does not. I seem to remember everything, though at times I remember nothing.
I often find myself walking somewhere and laughing at decades old jokes and punch lines — laughing not at the joke itself but at how funny it was at a certain place and time. I remember orgasmic thunderclaps of laughter in classrooms, corporate boardrooms, on subways and city buses. That all-at-once sound, an impossible product of just one person, is an astounding phenomenon.
I like how Webster’s describes laughter:
A movement (usually involuntary) of the muscles of the face, particularly of the lips, with a peculiar expression of the eyes, indicating merriment, satisfaction, or derision, and usually attended by a sonorous and interrupted expulsion of air from the lungs.”
What intrigues me about this definition is its use of “usually.” This definition attempts to lay down the meaning of this word prescriptively, but the weight of this definition seems to lose its balance as it tips toward a Yue Minjun-ian evocation of twisted laughter and painful smiling.
I know the sound and substance of forced (voluntary) laughter. I have performed this guttural act myself as a show of sarcasm.
Another running gag that I laugh at years later comes from college. A friend came up with a routine where he would say “Do you know me? Where I come from, I’m famous. They know this face!” He would squeeze his cheeks, demonstratively.
It might be impossible to communicate how or why this amused me so, except to add that he did this act in a voice that sounded like the guy from the “Mitsubishi wake-up call” radio commercials that aired years later.
“Laughter,” Webster’s continues, is
“…usually attended by a sonorous and interrupted expulsion of air from the lungs”
Since this is only the way laughter “usually” works, the underside of this definition evokes a sterile, horror-show image of a soul-drained human laughing voluntarily without the requisite expulsion of air from the lungs.
Again, Yue Minjun comes to mind, but in fact I question this part of the definition. How is laughter possible without expulsion of air from the lungs? And why must it be sonorous? Hideous, throaty cackles have rattled through all periods of my life.
I do not feel that laughter signals happiness. Laughter is a release of stress, or a signal of existential anxiety, but it does not prove happiness.
I have had days where I can not laugh. Those are the days I am dead inside.
