Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying

In 1994, in the barracks of Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, myself and other Army recruits huddled around the drill sergeant. If Grace Jones and Dave Chappelle had a son, he might look like this drill sergeant. The sergeant had a few sayings. When the situation was normal, all fucked up (SNAFU), he would say, "Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying."

The phrase struck me as insightful. So today as I read an evolutionary explanation of laughter by Basil Hugh Hall, I was reminded of just that:

Our organismal reaction to falling is fear, and a young child's screams of laughter when being tossed into the air by a trusted adult is an indication that the reflex fear response is being opposed by the child's tacit knowledge that he is in no danger. If the child is tossed by an adult with whom he is merely acquainted, he may not laugh at all, and as his fear level rises unopposed, the form of displacement becomes a communicative crying for help.

How do we account for the facts that some individuals laugh when in extreme danger, and some Cambodians, having escaped Pol Pot's reign of terror, reacted with laughter when told of further atrocities? At times, a general state of nervousness can be relieved by a spontaneous displacement of emotive neural activity into a short burst of laughter, probably facilitated by a small window of opportunity brought about by a momentary cognitive shift (a change from one line of thought to another (Latta 1999)).

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