Laugh It Off
If you want to have a good life, you've got to laugh. But not for the reasons you think.
“Did you know children laugh three hundred times a day?” I said to Steve, with fear in my voice. “Three hundred times! But for adults, it’s just seventeen.”
“Huh,” he said, because he did not understand why this was terrifying.
The benefits of laughing are astonishing. Laughing activates our immune system, eases depression and anxiety, stimulates our hearts and lungs, etc. Laughing in a hospital creates better outcomes, shorter stays, fewer infections. People who laugh have more friends and are more successful. If you want to flourish, you’ve got to laugh.
Of all the research on what it takes to flourish, laughter is the one that has frightened me the most, that has felt the most impossible. Which maybe seems weird. I can hear you now. “Netflix has eight million comedy specials. Have you heard of TikTok?! Laughing is the easiest thing there is!”
And that’s true. This video always gives me a joy infusion. I watch it about once a quarter. (It was written by Lin Manuel Miranda, before Hamilton, in case you’re wondering how is this so good?)
But inside this clip is also the reason why laughter, though it might be the best medicine, is more complicated than you think.
I love this whole song, but it really hits me at the end, when Neil Patrick Harris stops spinning and dancing and doing magic tricks while rapping, and he imagines the kids at home alone watching the show tonight. He imagines how lonely they are, and he sings, “So we might reassure that kid, and do something to spur that kid, cause I promise you all of us up here on stage tonight, we were that kid.”
The punchline of this joy extravaganza is the people. It’s the huge array of people sharing something wonderful together.
But for those of us watching at home… we’re still at home. Probably alone. Watching it. And it’s not the same.
Despite literally endless sources of laughter, more access to laughing than ever before in human history, we are more anxious, more depressed, more inflamed, and lonelier than we ever have been.
Feels like a disconnect, right? Laughing makes us flourish. We have endless sources of flourishing available to us.
And yet we’re lonely, and sad, and suffering. You know why? Because it’s not the laughter that we crave.
It’s the connection.
Real laughing, the kind of laughing that makes you flourish, the kind of laughing that lasts, is laughter that you can’t find on a screen. It has to be laughter between people.
I’m not knocking the value of a piece of art, like a great musical number, to help us flourish. That’s the whole purpose of art. It opens up avenues of connection. It exposes us to experiences and meanings and possibilities that we cannot imagine on our own. Art opens up doors.
But we don’t flourish until we walk through them. We can’t just watch a funny video. We have to laugh in person. Otherwise, it’s like watching a cooking show and expecting to be fed.
It’s the Connection We Truly Crave
In his book Supercommunicators, Charles Duhrigg set out to explore the science of forming deep connections. And there’s definitely science to it.
According to Duhrigg, when two people are speaking, if they are forming a strong connection, their brain waves will start to mimic each other, rising and falling together in matching waves. This happens even in groups. Scientists have discovered that you can accurately tell whether or not an interaction is successful based on whether or not the brain waves of the people in the group have started to operate in synch, a phenomenon known as “neural alignment.” And some people have the remarkable ability, in jury rooms or political auditoriums or concert arenas, to get dozens or even hundreds of thousands of people, to get their brain waves aligned.
The ability to make deep connections is important for everyone, but for some, it’s a matter of survival. Like hostage negotiators. Or CIA spies. Or astronauts. Duhrigg writes, “NASA needed people who could control their feelings, were sensitive to others’ emotions, and could connect with colleagues, even when tensions were running high and they were stuck in a small can hundreds of miles above the earth.” In other words, you’ve got to be able to get your brain scans to match across space.
When a NASA researcher scoured twenty years’ worth of archival footage of astronauts, he discovered that all the most successful people had one thing in common.
Their tapes were all filled with laughter.
And it’s not just astronauts. When there’s a lot of laughter in a job interview, the applicant is more likely to get the job. When there’s a lot of laughter in a sales meeting, you’re more likely to convert the pitch. If you want to evaluate whether your interaction with someone is successful, if you’re making a meaningful connection, just check: are they laughing?
So, then, it’s a one-two combination. You have to be with people. And then you have to make them laugh.
And that is what is really scary to me. I work from home. I don’t have kids, my extended family keeps shrinking. And I’m supposed to somehow generate three hundred laughs per day? “I can’t do it,” I said to Steve. “I’m not that funny!”
He laughed.
“That’s one,” I said, sadly.
It’s intimidating. How to generate so much laughter, in a world where we all feel so alone? How can we flourish?
But don’t panic. There’s one more plot twist, and it’s a good one.
Are You Laughing Yet?
When we watch a funny video, it has to be funny if it wants to make us laugh. But in person, laughing is a whole different story. Duhrigg talks about another project where a researcher secretly recorded human beings out in the wild, tracking conversations on buses and in shopping malls and at restaurants, just clocking laughter.
Their findings weren’t funny. Literally! “Contrary to our expectations,” he said, “We found that most conversational laughter is not a response to structured attempts at humor, such as jokes or stories. Less than 20 percent of the laughter in our sample was a response to anything resembling a formal effort at humor.”
Instead, as Duhrigg wrote, “People laughed because they wanted to connect with the person they were speaking with.”
"Less than 20 percent of the laughter in our sample was a response to anything resembling a formal attempt at humor…People laughed because they wanted to connect.”
— Charles Duhrigg
In fact, Provine noted, the majority of laughter “seemed to follow rather banal remarks such as does anyone have a rubber band?: It was nice meeting you too; I think I’m done.”
I was stunned… and excited… at this revelation. I felt empowered. I can laugh just because someone wants a rubber band?! This is something I can do!
Turns out, in person, laughter isn’t about humor. It’s about feeling something. When we want to form connections with people, at a scientific level, we are looking for neural alignment. We’re trying to match brain waves. When brain waves of two people are aligned, they’re connecting. And the best way to align brain waves?
Share a feeling.
And the simplest way to share a feeling, to invite someone to align with you, or to align with them?
Just laugh. Doesn’t matter if it’s funny. Laughing is a cue that says, I want to match my brain waves to yours. And the natural response when someone laughs with you, is to laugh back with them.
You laugh, they laugh, brain waves get in synch, boom, we’re connected.
We laugh, in other words, to show someone that we want to connect with them — and our companions laugh back to demonstrate they want to connect with us, as well.
- Charles Duhrigg
And by the way, the opposite is also true. Supercommunicators are also more likely to express sorrow in interactions. They’re more likely to share a sad story, or a vulnerable story. (This is a great CIA recruitment trick. Agents confess one of their deep secrets, their targets do the same, boom, double agent acquired.)
Kids lead with their hearts. They laugh. They cry. They do both way more often than adults do. And when the person we are with expresses a deep feeling, when they laugh, when they cry, then we feel called to do the same. But as adults, I suspect, we tend to tamp our emotions down — and the ones that come out most often, frustration or anger or impatience, don’t tend to lead to bonds.
So I’ve been working on this simple trick. I’m laughing. Not because I’m funny. But because I want you to know I’m paying attention.
To me, this feels a lot more possible. I don’t have to be funny. I just have to feel something with someone.
If you’re lonely, if you’re looking to connect, and these days most of us are lonely, most of us are looking to connect, then it’s a simple first step.
Laugh. With someone. For no damn reason at all.
Yup, I'm using this one!!!!
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