Why Laughter is Harmful and Insincere
Laughing is commonly seen as a good thing. After all, it makes us happy, releases endorphins and there are a great many articles and research that suggest it may even lead to a longer, healthier life. I am not going to discuss or challenge any of these assumptions. I just want to shine a light on a different aspect of laughter: why we do it — and what it does to others.
Before we can debate the title of this article, we need to briefly define “harmful” and “insincere”. I’d say harmful is what causes pain or other undesired emotions. In other words: it causes people to be worse off than before. A broken arm is harmful since you are less happy afterward. Being insincere means to deceit and be dishonest.
Harm can be good in the long-term. Punishments have the intent to harm in the short-term but achieve good long-term results.
Now, back to the original statement (I hate articles that take ages to define common words). Laughing is a social activity (we are 30x more likely to laugh in groups than alone, even when seeing e.g. the same cartoon). As such, it helps define group membership and bonds people.
“Just a joke” is a myth
We’ve all heard someone follow up on a joke that the person being joked about did not take very well with the comment “c’mon it’s just a joke”. By that, we try to say, that the content of what was said was somehow not true or “not meant that way”. This is simply wrong. Jokes always carry meaning. That meaning is always truthful — and only truthful facts can hurt. If I make fun of you, then very likely, the trait, behavior, etc. I am making fun of is displayed by you (at least to some degree). If not, then my joke at least carries truth as to what I think of you. Every joke about someone, e.g. being stupid contains at least one of these underlying truth:
a. The person is actually not the brightest, a bit slow intellectually, a bit clumsy
b. The person making the joke, for some reason perceives the one they joke about to be stupid, even if they are actually smart
In either case, jokes are hurtful — and meant to be that way. They are an insincere way of criticizing, challenging, and establishing hierarchy. Laughing is agreeing to jokes — but for laughter, the joke can also be implicit (like a person falling on their face). Essentially there are three different categories of jokes and laughter:
- Laughing and joking about others
I think it is quite clear how this is harmful. Laughing is a rather subtle way to degrade and exclude others. This dynamic is usually seen as good, because it also means that the ingroup moves closer together. The problem is, that the reason is rather shallow: external, shared enemies. Laughing helps bond over degrading others. So the laughter may be beneficial to the group in a short-term sense. And it might even feel good. But do you really want a shared enemy to be the basis of your relationships? - Laughing about oneself
When we laugh about ourselves, it is a play signal. We show others’ that despite the pain of a physical or emotional injury, we are still keen to play on. This is harmful because it hints at a rough and unaware group culture in which pain is easily ignored. The pain does not go away because it is ignored, it just makes people miserable and insecure.
This effect is strongly pronounced in a lot of stand-up “comedy”. I never got the idea behind people making fun of themselves, especially for shallow things like being handicapped, unattractive, or based on their ethnicity or gender (and these are the most common reasons for laughter in stand-up comedy, in my experience). - Laughing about concepts/institutions/impersonal groups
Laughter can also be directed at more abstract things like in political comedy. Comedy as a form of art was — and is, a form of resistance against an oppressor. The oppressor who is perceived too strong to be attacked directly is ridiculed and thereby degraded and criticized. While criticizing authorities is great, the insincere and indirect way in which laughing does it is not very helpful. Comedy, to stick with this example, rarely points out ways to improve, and is thus just a sneaky way to give destructive (instead of constructive) feedback.
To conclude: Laughing is always an insincere way of inflicting harm — and to be honest, we are quite aware of this. It is a way to give feedback, but instead of doing so privately and constructively, it is done publicly and destructively.
Sometimes it may be beneficial to use laughter as a bonding strategy for groups if there is nothing else to hold them together but a shared enemy.
I think reflected, self-aware people feel no urgency to either degrade themselves or others. Instead, they directly confront problems, give constructive feedback and bond over shared goals, ideas, visions, work, passions, hobbies, or otherwise constructive and creative things.
Smiling, on the other hand, can be a genuine way of communicating liking someone or being positively-minded towards them.
More input about this:
PS. you can also die from laughing ;)
