The Strange Power of Laughter
January 23, 2025 at 10:50PMIf you fall down in her presence, you can count on my sister-in-law to laugh at you. She’s powerless against physical comedy and is unable to hold back. Even if it might seem inappropriate that she finds your tumble hilarious, she can’t help getting caught in a “giggle loop.” For Sapiens, Kirsten Bell explores laughter as a social, cultural, and cross-species phenomenon. As she examines why what we find amusing is sometimes associated with good (or bad!) taste, she suggests that sometimes busting out is well beyond our conscious control.
In the end, it’s clear that laughter is a deeply curious thing. It’s simultaneously the most social of human expressions and the one most disruptive of social edifices and rules. Shared, sanctioned laughter might bring us together, but unsanctioned laughter shows the cracks, revealing that we’re not quite who we think.
More picks on the human experience
My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things
“How can someone even function as a human being without the ability to imagine pictures and sounds?”
A Freediver Finds Belonging Without Breath
“I’ve retrained my mind to be underwater.”
Living In A Lucid Dream
“Recent research on lucid dreams suggests that consciousness exists along a spectrum between sleep and waking, between hallucination and revelation, between dreamworlds and reality.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/23/the-strange-power-of-laughter/
via IFTTT
Watch