Humor is vaguely defined. We know it exists; most of us are capable of experiencing and understanding it but it’s different for many people what exactly constitutes it. We laugh in groups, and we laugh alone, or we laugh at media. I want to discuss laughing in isolation, laughing by yourself at a thought or at a piece of work like a book. Robert Solomon’s take on laughter is that it serves as a social mechanism to enhance solidarity, and that “the humor is in the laughing together, rather than the joke itself. (83)” I happen to like this idea of laughter and humor quite a bit but there is one area of concern for me where he does not say much. He says that we may laugh by ourselves, but “unless you are a somewhat unusual person, you will not laugh as loud or as much when you are alone. (83)” But why might we laugh alone in the first place? Solomon does not say. Unless I’m one of the unusual people that he is talking about and this is now a piece exposing me for being a freak, I laugh to myself fairly often. I’m not talking all the time, but if a funny thought enters my mind, I often will give a little laugh where a bit of air leaves my nose and the sides of my lips turn into a smile only meant for myself. Sure it’s not always as big as with a group, but it’s still a laugh. A similar thing happens when I read books with lines that are funny and I am able to engage with the text in that way. So why do we laugh at all if it’s supposed to be purely a social activity? Is it some kind of residue? A kind of practice for laughing later down the line? A connection between two parts of yourself, fulfilling Solomon’s theory that humor/laughter is essentially social? Am I just insane and this is something only I do?
First, I don’t think I’m crazy and I think that this is something people do. If this is not true, stop reading here. So what am I doing when I laugh to myself about something? If we look at what Solomon says, we can tell that he thinks that when I laugh to myself, I am experiencing my own humor in a way that is less than if I was expressing this emotion to others. Humor is, like he says, is “in the laughing together.” So if I’m laughing by myself, where is it? It could be because I have some kind of id, ego, superego split and the moralizing superego is laughing at the thought of what the ego has come up with, and this certainly could be the case. Laughing, and that sense of humor forms a kind of solidarity between differing levels of consciousness, a kind of internal socialization that lets the parts of your brain work together better. I am not a psychologist and I am not qualified to confirm or deny if this is happening inside of us. But it could make sense of Solomon’s theory and might be interesting to think about with regards to other emotions.
Another way of thinking about this might be that your sense of humor developed from socialization causes you to laugh when there is no social interaction out of habit. You find something funny because you were socialized to find it funny, and when you see something “funny” outside of social interaction you are conditioned through your sense of humor to laugh at it. You are laughing because you think if this was shared between you and other people it would be worth laughing at. “Humor is in the laughing together, not the joke itself.” But I sometimes find things funny that other people don’t necessarily find funny, and I am able to laugh at those things. Usually it is based on a belief I have, maybe a belief that few people hold or an experience that was singular to me. I would have to be making up other people who held those beliefs/experiences to be able to laugh at them because I think that if other people like me existed I could laugh with them and have social solidarity. There might be more truth to this than it would initially seem because we are so good at imagining.
When I laugh at a book, which I am prone to do if the book is particularly funny, it means that I’m having a social reaction to an isolated experience. No one else is reading the book with me and I am usually doing it where no one else is around because if they were it would be harder to read the book. So why laugh from solidarity? Am I in solidarity with the author? Possibly. Am I in solidarity with the invented people from the previous paragraph? Maybe. Am I laughing in solidarity with different areas of my mind? Schizophrenia often forms in people my age. Am I even laughing from solidarity? Sometimes it feels like I just laugh because it’s funny. Nothing deeper than that. So much of the human experience is only in the moment. No analysis happens. Nothing more complex than the present. Maybe it’s informed by past experiences, but that’s not how it always feels. I don’t feel like my laughter is meant to form solidarity when I laugh. It just wells up in me when I come across something funny in both social and isolated moments. I don’t mind that it helps form solidarity, but I don’t think that it’s the goal all of the time. Sometimes it feels like a release. I remember feeling overwhelmed by a situation and laughing because it seemed so silly that I’d be in the situation I was in. I am clumsy and I do clumsy things that are funny to me because of how often I do them. There aren’t any people privy to those moments and yet I sometimes laugh. Sometimes I have moments where I feel like a parody of a person and it makes me laugh. It makes me feel better about those situations. It lightens things up for myself and no one else. In fact I sometimes explicitly don’t want anyone else there or in on my thoughts.
I don’t think Solomon’s theory is necessarily wrong, and maybe laughter is sourced from solidarity but I’m not sure that it can be there all of the time for that. Sometimes it seems like it just might be for ourselves, or possibly for no one at all. We have our humor and we have our reaction to the humor. If it was all in the laughing together then I don’t think that we would laugh as much by ourselves as we do or have developed senses of humor that are unique to ourselves. I’m not sure if I am right, but I am also not entirely sure Solomon is wholly right. I think there is enough of a gray zone there to be one or the other, both, or neither. We are complicated and don’t always follow a predictable pattern. All I know is that I laugh.
Shared by: Evan