Waiting in the sitting room for my dad’s truck to arrive for me, I was a spectator, looking through the mahogany-trimmed doorway into the kitchen. Women with prayer caps, Grandma Longenecker and Aunt Ruthie, were sitting at the gray, Formica-topped table facing one another, eating their supper of garden-fresh green beans, laced with fried bacon. Something else may have been served, but I remember only the scent of baconβ€”and the laughing. They laughed, and laughed, and then laughed some moreβ€”spasms of laughter sparking more laughing. Any second, I expected them to fall off their chairs. They laughed so hard I could see tears starting to run down their cheeks. Who knows, one of them may have wet her pants.

From my secret perch in the adjoining room, I remember the ambivalence of being intrigued by their shared jollity but also feeling shut out from understanding what had made them so giddyβ€”all of it a mystery to me. “What was so funny?” I wonder still.

 

The Elizabethtown (PA) Chronicle, 1950s

 


 

More Mystery

β€œWhat’s so funny?” 

How the body laughs is well understood. Amusement initiates the coordinated action of fifteen facial muscles, beginning with a lift of the eyebrows and a rise of eye- and cheek-muscle contractions known as the β€œsurprise response.” What follows are spasmodic skeletal muscle contractions, a quickened heartbeat, and rapid breathing. The diaphragm contracts in conic movements that crescendo and then diminish.

How the brain processes humor remains a mystery. It’s easy to make someone smile or cry by electronically stimulating a single region of the brain, but it’s astonishingly difficult to make someone laugh. The β€œlaughter circuit” is complex and various. Puns are processed on the left side of the brain by gyri, bumpy areas on the surface of the cerebral cortex; more complex, non-wordplay jokes are routed through gyri on the right side of the brain and also trigger electronic activity in many other parts of the brain. . . .

Tad Friend, The New Yorker, August 19, 2024, page 17

 

Benefits of Laughter

 

 

Proverbs 15:13

A merry heart makes a cheerful countenance: but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken.

 

 


Have you had a laughing spell–or observed others doing the same?

Any recent (or, past) funny moments to report?