Laughter is Not Frivolous

Last week I wrote about tears.

About the box of tissues in my office, and what it means to let someone fall apart without rushing in to fix it. About being witnessed instead of managed.

This week I want to talk about the other side of that.

Laughter.

I've been watching a British game show called Last One Laughing — where a group of comedians spend six hours together with one rule: do not laugh. If you get caught laughing, you get a yellow card. A second time, a red card, and you're out — sent to watch from another room while everyone else keeps going.

The premise sounds simple. It is not simple.

Bob Mortimer — one of Britain's most beloved comedians — said this about the experience: "I thought it would be easy not to laugh. I spend most of my days not laughing. But it's so difficult. As soon as you walk in, there's a strange atmosphere in the room."

He also admitted he considered hiding somewhere just to survive the first hour.

These are professional comedians. People whose entire lives are built around humor. And suppressing laughter — even intentionally, even in a game — became what participants described as psychological warfare. The need to laugh, held back, becomes physically uncomfortable. The body wants to release what it's holding.

Sound familiar?

There is something that happens when laughter is not allowed. Something that doesn't feel right. Like the body knows it's being asked to do something unnatural.

Because it is.

My daughter is almost 30 now. Long before smartphones, long before any of us thought to capture every moment on a device, she discovered her ears. I don't know exactly what delighted her — whether it changed the sound around her, or whether it simply felt funny to her tiny hands, or to her ears themselves. But she laughed and laughed and laughed. Pure, uncomplicated, full-body baby laughter. I have no video of it. No photo. Just the memory — and it is so clear. So vivid. So completely untouched by self-consciousness.

She wasn't performing. She wasn't managing herself. She just laughed because something was delightful, and her whole body said so. That's what laughter looks like before we learn to hold it in. Somewhere along the way, most of us learned to manage our laughter the same way we learned to manage our tears. We learned when it was appropriate. We learned to stifle it in quiet rooms, to apologize when it came out too loud, to read the atmosphere and decide whether joy was welcome here. We learned to be smaller.

Laughter is not frivolous. It is not a break from real life — it is real life. It is the body saying: this is good. This is funny. I am alive and something just delighted me.

Babies know this. Comedians suppressing laughter for six hours know this. Your body knows this. So here's what I want to leave you with this week: Where is there laughter in your life right now? Not performed laughter. Not polite laughter. The kind that just happens — before you can decide whether it's appropriate. The kind that your body needs the same way it needs to cry.

Where can you find a little more of that?

Both are allowed. The tears and the laughter. The falling apart and the breaking open with joy. You don't have to manage either one.