THINGS THAT MAKE US LAUGH

You don’t want to be drinking a cup of hot tea when something or someone makes you laugh.  I’m sure you don’t need to know what happened when that happened to me this morning, but I will need to wash my red placemat. Fortunately I wasn’t chewing on one of my chocolate chip cookies at the time.

I guess what happened would be called a snort. It’s not one of the action words listed in my Thesaurus, however, but there are such choices as chuckle, giggle, snicker, chortle, guffaw, roar and cackle. None of those seem to fit although they all come under the heading of laughter.

All of us don’t agree on what is funny and some of us laugh a lot more often than others. Kids provide a lot of laughs but sometimes when we are laughing, the parent may be screaming. And what kids find funny with each other often makes adults roll their eyes and think, “I don’t get it.”

I was thinking the other day about the old Road Runner cartoons and the Three Stooges movies. There is a great deal of violence in both and yet it’s hard for most of us to stop laughing while watching the characters bash each other over the head. And it’s really interesting that we can also recognize that those actions are not appropriate to do in “real” life.

We think about kids and animals and cartoons and comedians and standup comics and clowns being able to make us laugh, but many other things do the same. It always seems that art is serious and music is many other things but not funny. Not true and I don’t mean just because someone doesn’t draw well or the singer is off key. There are funny pieces of art to be found in galleries and museums and also songs that make us laugh.

What causes us to laugh may be accidental or the intent may be to make you fall off of your chair because the comedian is so funny, or the humor may be designed to make us simply smile.

Enjoying humor requires intelligence and sophistication. Yes, even if it is slapstick. The very earliest humans certainly couldn’t communicate the way we do and probably didn’t find running away from a tiger to be funny.  Our appreciation of humor has developed over the years.

But, whatever it is that makes us laugh, we should just be happy that we have been given the gift of knowing how to produce a grin, giggle or guffaw.  Even a snort.

COMING NEXT:  Hobbies Should Be Fun