What Are You Laughing At?

    Here's a small experiment I want you try, a little project to help you understand what I'm getting at. No worries—it's real easy, real quick. I'm not the kind of person to hand out homework, trust me. All I want you to do is to remember the last time you laughed.

    Odds are you've laughed at least once today already. We all do it, and we all do it all the time. (And don't dismiss this just because you think you're the grumpy, humorless type; all that tells me is that on those rare occasions that you do laugh, the experience is probably so traumatizing that you're bound to remember it.) If your morning has just begun and you haven't had any chance to laugh yet, just take note once it does happen, and it will, and when you catch yourself giggling or grinning or guffawing—whether that be at the political cartoon thumbtacked above your computer or when that kid you hate eats concrete at the skate park—immediately stop and ask yourself: ...why did I just laugh at that?

    Who knows—you might even be laughing right now at this whole thing. Why do we laugh? Is that what all this is about? WHY do we LAUGH? Ridiculous, right? Because we all know why it is we laugh. We laugh when things are funny, duh.

    If only it were that simple.

    Let me tell you a story. I was friends once with this Robotlass. Real cool girl, down for anything, never caused any drama. Well, she started going through puberty around the same time as me, so she was there when my voice started to crack, and I was there when her programming initiated the doubting of her own sapience. During this awkward phase, she started to see how different she was from everyone else, mainly how others were exhibiting these weird things called "emotions" and she wasn't.

    So, since she couldn't comprehend true feelings like the rest of us, she came up with this strategy where she would just mimic the emotion, thinking that an imitation would at least be better than nothing at all.

    Take fear. She knew how people looked when they were afraid (dilated pupils, rapid breathing, increased heart rate, sweaty palms, etc.), and so she'd just imitate that look whenever she could. It didn't take long for her to figure out, though, that having a reaction is only part of the formula. For a few weeks there, she would scream and loosen her mechanical bowels every time someone made eye contact with her in the hallway. (But really, how different were any of us at that age?) It took her some time, though, to notice how every human reaction also has a corresponding stimulus, and that she should only show signs of fear (the reaction) when there was some kind of obvious threat to her or to something she cared about (the stimulus). But once she got the hang of that, it was only a matter of tweaking the degrees and variables before she could fake fear well enough for us all to believe it as if it were the real thing.

    She went through this process with every emotion she observed. If she noticed a new reaction, she would reverse engineer that reaction until she uncovered the thing that caused it to begin with. We helped her out as best we could. When she asked why Jill blushed and looked at her feet when we caught her giving tongue to a photograph of Frankie Demigula, we said that reaction was called "humiliation," and we told her that humiliation was the response we give when we encounter anything that's "embarrassing" to us. And then she would ask what "embarrassing" meant, and one of us would pull out the dictionary and read: "when an act committed in front of others is socially unacceptable." And we just went on and on like that with every emotion she didn't understand. Kind of like teaching a kid how to read...or how to mimic reading, maybe? I dunno.

    Sometimes she would want to know why we had certain emotions in the first place, wanted to know what purpose they served. She said if she knew the reason behind an emotion, she could create a more accurate representation of it. So we told her that the reason we experience fear is because it helps keep us out of danger, or that the reason we show humiliation is to communicate to others that we know we did something weird and to please stop bringing it up.

    We didn't know any of these for a fact; we just kind of guessed until they felt right. And this system worked out well...until she started to ask about laughter.

    When she asked what the stimulus was that caused laughter, we told her that we laugh whenever we find something funny. When she asked what it meant for something to be "funny," we pulled out the dictionary and read what it said: "fun·ny [fŭn′ē]: adj.—causing laughter or amusement." 

    But she was unsatisfied with that. She called it a "definition loop," and then she showed off her well-practiced imitation of fear, since a "definition loop" is dangerously close to a paradox, which can be lethal to Robots. We laugh at anything that is funny, and funny is anything that makes us laugh. A loop like that can fry a fuse in a Robot's processor faster than you can hit CTRL+SHIFT+ESC. We told her not to think about that one until we came up with a safer answer. She agreed, and never asked us about laughter again. She ended up transferring to another school that year, and we never got the chance to give her the permission to laugh again. I hope she found out the answer on her own. Maybe I should try and find her, now that I'm thinking about it. Not just to catch up, but to see if she ever figured it out...and if she did, if she wouldn't mind sharing with the rest of us.

    But can you imagine what she would have to go through just to answer that one question? For her to even understand when to laugh, she would need to learn how to identify when something was funny versus not-funny. So imagine that. Imagine her coming up to you with a rock in her hand asking you if it was funny or not. You would say no, and she would ask why, and then you would say you don't know why, that it's just not funny. Then she would ask you to describe what something that was funny looked like or sounded like or tasted like so she could keep an eye out for it. What would you tell her then?

    Would you say that funny is anything that's amusing, like the dictionary hints at? Amusing meaning: "anything that holds attention"? Maybe...but not everything that causes amusement is funny. I once spent two whole hours watching a couple of ants drag a stale tater tot around my kitchen. Amusing? Absolutely. Funny? Not really. Tragic, if anything. They died hungry and away from their families. 

    Maybe, if you're smart, you would tell my Robot friend to compile an ongoing list of times she's witnessed other people laugh and what they laughed at, then she would eventually have a large archive of things that were supposedly funny and also a list of socially appropriate times she could laugh. Smart thinking—this may even be how my friend solved her little crisis. But I've got a couple of issues with that. 

    Not everything that causes laughter is funny. I think all of us have at least one horrifying memory of being tickled by a long-fingered relative until our eyes bulged out of our sockets and our lungs scrunched down to the size of prunes. Does tickling cause laughter? Yeah, painfully so. Is it funny? No, no, no, a thousand times no! Someone for the love of God pull Grandma off ME BEFORE I THROW UP MY OWN PEE!

    And not only that, but does everything that's funny always cause laughter? As in, if there's no laughter, can it not be considered funny? Does a smirk or a nod or a snort not count? Or what about when a joke gets a laugh from one group but dead silence from another? Is that joke funny or not funny? How would you explain to my poor Robot friend how to tell the difference between the exact same words spoken by the exact same person be considered both funny and not-funny? And don't say, "Well...if people are laughing, then it's funny." No! You're still not getting it! How could she...predict whether a joke or a sound or an image would be found funny or not? As opposed to just interesting or joyful or confusing? How about that, wiseguy?

    Go ahead, friend. Try again. Can you come up with a definition of the word funny that isn't just a synonym but a true definition, a true prediction, a true elaboration?

    What's that? Funny is a "release of tension," you're saying? Yeah, I get that. Like when you build tension with a set-up then relieve it with a punchline. Boom. Tension relief == funny. It's like when you have one of those long nightmares about being chased by flying food processors and then, right as one of them starts to puree your foot, you instantly wake up in your comfy bed, figuring out that all that tension and fear was an illusion, and you are overcome with cold relief and an odd tingling in your ankle. That's good comedy right there. One thing, though...how exactly does that explain jokes that have no tension? Like a funny(!) drawing? Or when a baby faceplants at the bottom of a slide? Yeah, I'm not too sure about this one. What else you got?   

    Funny is a "delightful surprise"? Like when a husband has dinner ready when the wife gets home? Hilarious. Or like that story where the Soldier picks her kid up at school without telling anyone that she's home from deployment? I'm sure those were tears of laughter I saw in that kid's eyes. "Do it again, Mommy! Do it again!" Next.

    Funny is...when we...make sense of something that doesn't...make sense? Is that what you're telling me? Is that why there's always so much laughter coming from science labs? Come on, we can do better. And don't you dare say "It's funny because it's true!", because there's a lot of things that are true, like how bad you are at this, and that's not funny, is it? Well, I guess it kind of is...or is it? Agh!

    Well how about this. Let's do what my Robot friend would do when she was in our situation. Let's ask ourselves: what is humor's purpose? Why have we evolved to laugh at things we find funny (whatever that word means)? What good is a sense of humor to anyone?

    ... 

    ...

    ...

    Nothing? Oh, come on! Don't tell me that you're giving up! Surely this ain't the case. Surely you know what funny is. Surely we all know what it is by now! Even if we might not know its evolutionary purpose just yet, we should at least be able to define it...right? 

    I mean, humor isn't some new phenomenon, and neither is it all that complicated. For Doug's sake, babies learn to laugh before they even learn to speak! And even then, speaking and standing upright have to be taught—laughter doesn't. Obviously our sense of humor is significant enough for our instincts to prioritize it higher than even walking or talking or keeping our food in our mouths. You see what I'm getting at yet?

    For all that, we go our whole lives without wondering about our own laughter, without questioning this bizarre thing we all do. But it doesn't stop us from partaking in it. Everyday I walk around and see people laughing and chuckling and snickering, and all I want to do is grab them by the shoulders and shake them and yell, "WHY?! WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING?! WHY ARE ANY OF US LAUGHING?! ARE YOU MAD?! IS THE WORLD MAD?! WHY DON'T ANY OF US QUESTION?! WHY, WHY, WHY?!" 

    But I don't do that anymore. Not since the restraining order. Because something occurred to me: why would I know the answer to this question? I am no Philosopher, no Scholar, no Scientist. The responsibility of solving this issue is not mine to bear. So I did some research, and as it turns out, me and my Robot friend were far from the first to wonder about the nature of humor, and even further from the only people to ever do so. Many millennia's worth of research and study and pontificating has been dedicated to this very subject by some of history's smartest minds. And the culmination of all this is surprising, and the result is clear.

    What is humor, then?

    Why is it that we laugh? 

    Simple:

    We have no sucking idea.