In the freedom of pretend play, children learn that there are multiple perspectives upon objects, actions, and identities. The child moves out of the egocentrism of his or her own mind and learns that the beliefs and representations of other minds most certainly differ from one’s own. And it is laughter that transports children to this platform of understanding and epistemological insight.
Developmental psychologists who have studied the pretend play of siblings in the home, or the playful wrestling of parents and children, or the playful exchanges of children on the playground, find that laughter reliably initiates and frames play routines. A child or a parent will laugh as a chase game, roughhousing, round of silly wordplay or storytelling gets under way. Linguist Paul Drew carefully analyzed the unfolding of family teasing interactions and found that they are framed by laughs. Laughter is a portal to the world of pretense, play, and the imagination; it is an invitation to a nonliteral world where the truths of identities, objects, and relations are momentarily suspended, and alternatives are willingly entertained. Those hours of pretend play—peek-a-boo games, monsters and princesses, the ogre under the bridge, astronauts—are the gateway to empathy and the moral imagination.
LA PETITE VACATION
In the observation that laughter accompanies the child’s capacity to pretend, to participate in alternatives to the realities referred to in sincere communication, we arrive at a hypothesis about laughter. Let’s call this hypothesis the laughter as vacation hypothesis. The name of this hypothesis honors the comedian Milton Berle, witness, it is safe to claim, to millions of laughs during his career. Summing up the mysteries of laughter, Berle proposed, “Laughter is an instant vacation.” If orgasm for the French is la petite mort (the little death), laughter is la petite vacation.
The wisdom of Berle’s hypothesis is found in the etymology of “vacation,” which yields a nuanced story. The word “vacation” traces its linguistic history back to the Latin vacare, which means to be “empty, free, or at leisure” and is defined as a formal suspension of activity or duty. The laugh, then, signals the suspension of formal, sincere meaning. It points to a layer of interaction where alternatives to assumed truths are possible, where identities are lighthearted and nonserious. When people laugh, they are taking a momentary vacation from the more sincere claims and implications of their actions.
So let’s weave our facts and speculations together into the petite vacation hypothesis. In our primate evolution, laughter begins in the open-mouth play faces of chimps and bonobos, which signal and initiate playful routines. The quality of laughter, its sound and function and feeling, is rooted in physical action, as Darwin long ago observed: It is intertwined with exhalation, and the reduction in stress-related physiology. A special realm of sound is reserved for laughs, and it is an ancient one that predates language, represented in old regions of the nervous system—the brain stem—which also regulates breathing. This acoustic space reserved for laughs triggers laughter and pleasure in others, and designates, like the confines of a circus or theater, a social realm for acts of pretense and the imagination. In the pretend play of young children, laughter enables playful routines that allow them to have alternative perspectives on the world they are facing. Laughter is a ticket to the world of pretense, it is a two-to three-second vacation from the encumbrances, burdens, and gravity of the world of literal truths and sincere commitments.
LAUGHING AT DEATH
My dear friend and colleague George Bonanno took a while to get to academics. After riding trains, picking apples in Washington State, living in communes, and painting signs in Arizona, he decided, on a whim, to take a community college creative writing course. After his first submission, he was discovered by his instructor, and quickly found himself on a fast track toward a PhD at Yale. Proponents of the conventional view of trauma may have wished that he never took that writing course.
For the past fifteen years, using intensive narrative interviews and longitudinal designs, he has studied how individuals adapt to various kinds of trauma—the death of a marital partner, the 9 /11 attacks, sexual abuse, the death of a child. He kept encountering a basic finding not anticipated in the literature on trauma. The conventional view is that after a trauma everyone suffers prolonged periods of maladjustment, anxiety, distress, and depression. George has found in every study he has conducted that a significant proportion of people suffering a trauma experience distress and upset but, in the broader scheme of things, fare quite well. Within a year, they are as happy as they were, more poignant perhaps, filled with bursts of breathless longing, but in the end, content with life, and perhaps a bit wiser.
His question: What allows people to adjust to life-altering traumas? Our answer: Laughter. Laughter provides a brief vacation from the existential impossibilities, the deep sadness, the disorienting anxieties, of losing a loved one, or losing a city or way of life.
To test this thesis, George and I undertook a study to look at the role of laughter during bereavement. To do so, we brought forty-five adults to our laboratory, individuals who six months prior had watched their spouses die. Six months into bereavement is a poignant time. The death of a spouse leaves individuals mildly depressed, disoriented, lonely, and disorganized. The daily rhythms of a marriage are gone. So too are the conversations about what happened during the day, the fragments of a dream, the funny thing a friend or loved one did or said, how work went. Bereaved adults often have trouble conducting the daily affairs of their lives—remembering to pay bills, plan dinners, go shopping, fix cars—because the other part of their collective mind is gone. Reminders of their partner—photos, clothing, scents and sounds from the past—weigh them down in yearning. So we asked: Would laughter prompt bereaved adults to find new layers of meaning in the midst of trauma, and perhaps a path to the meaningful life?
Our forty-five participants came to George’s lab in San Francisco, really an upstairs room in an old Victorian, with wood floors and paned glass. After some preliminary talk, George asked the participants the simplest of things, to “tell me about your relationship with your deceased partner.” They were then given six minutes to tell their narratives of their relationships with the deceased spouse. There were stories of meeting one another at a blues show, of wild youth, raising children, and then bleeding gums that presaged a rapid death six months later, with children at the mother’s side at the hospital bed. One man, in response to George’s question, could only sob and gasp for six minutes, uttering not a word. I remember another woman whose husband had committed suicide at the end of a manic episode that was capped off by a disturbing visit to his mother. At the end of her narrative of this freefall, one could hear doves cooing on the windowsill of the lab room.
As George planned the next stages of this longitudinal study (he has assessed the well-being of these individuals for several years), he sent me the videotapes of these conversations. For an entire summer, locked up in my laboratory video coding room in the basement of my department, I coded these six-minute conversations with Ekman and Friesen’s Facial Action Coding System. Each conversation took about six hours to code. Spending eight hours each day listening to stories of dying and coding such deep emotion left me exhausted and humbled. Almost all of our participants showed numerous displays of negative emotion, such as anger, sadness, fear, and, less frequently, disgust.
Our question was a simple one that had never been addressed before: What emotions predict healthy adjustment to the death of a spouse, as assessed with clinically sound measures of anxiety and depression, as well as measures of prolonged bereavement, which captures the individual’s continuing longing for the deceased and inability to reenter into daily living? And which emotions predict poor adjustment during bereavement?
Traditional bereavement theories offer two clear predictions. This thinking is based on Freudian notions of “working through” the emotional pain of loss and the cathartic release of anger. It predicts that recovery from bereavement depends on the increased expression o
f negative emotions, such as anger and sadness. A second prediction is that the expression of positive emotion is in actuality a pathological sign of denial, of an intentional turning away from the existential facts of trauma, and impedes grief resolution. Our thinking was just the opposite, that laughter would allow our bereaved participants to distance themselves momentarily from the pain of the loss, to gain perspective, to look upon their lives in a more detached way, to find a moment of peace, to take a deep breath, so to speak.
Our first finding lent support to this view of laughter. Measures of laughter (and smiling) predicted reduced grief as assessed at six, fourteen, and twenty-five months postloss. Those participants who showed pleasurable, Duchenne laughter while talking about their deceased spouses were less anxious and depressed, and more engaged in their daily living, for the next two years. Just as important, people who showed more anger were observed to be experiencing more anxiety, depression, and disengagement from daily living for the next two years.
A first objection one might raise with respect to these findings concerns the nature of the death. Perhaps those individuals who laughed had partners who experienced easier deaths and thereby felt less initial grief and, as a result, were better able to adjust to this difficult loss. We know from empirical studies of bereavement that the nature of the death matters—sudden deaths, and deaths that produce greater financial demands upon the spouse, lead to prolonged grief and difficulty readjusting. We also know that the severity of the individual’s initial grief powerfully predicts the degree of difficulty in adjusting that that person will experience later. These possibilities did not explain away the benefits of laughter: Those individuals who showed pleasurable laughter compared to those who did not did not differ in the nature of their spouse’s death (its unexpectedness or financial impact) nor in their initial levels of grief.
One might likewise argue that perhaps our individuals who laughed at death were just happier individuals to begin with. Perhaps our results linking laughter to adjustment were simply the products of the temperamental happiness of the individual and not the emotional dynamics and perspective shifts accompanying laughter. This alternative too proved untenable—our people who laughed did not differ on any conventional measure of dispositional happiness from our individuals who did not laugh.
Buoyed by these findings, George and I went on a search for further evidence in support of the benefits of laughter. Why did laughing while talking about the deceased partner relate to increased personal adjustment? What we observed were findings very much in keeping with the laughter as vacation hypothesis. Our first analysis looked at how bereaved individuals’ experience of distress tracked one physiological index of arousal—elevated heart rate. The bereaved individuals who laughed showed similar heart rate arousal as those who did not laugh. But whereas our nonlaughers’ feelings of distress closely tracked increases in their heart rate, our laughers’ feelings of distress were decoupled from this physiological index of stress. Metaphorically, laughers were taking a vacation from the stress of their partners’ deaths, freed from the tension of stress-related physiology.
We then transcribed their conversations and identified exactly what the bereaved participants were talking about when they laughed. Here again, data suggest that laughter is not a sign of denial of trauma, as widely assumed, but an indicator of a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination. We coded participants’ references to several existential themes related to bereavement—loss, yearning, injustice, uncertainty. We also coded for insight words that reflect a shift in perspective, phrases like “I see” or “from this perspective” or “looking back.” Our participants who laughed were most likely to be talking about the injustice of death—the unfair termination of life, the difficulties of raising a family alone, the loss of intimacy—but they engaged in this discourse with perspective-shifting clauses. Laughter was part of these individuals’ shift in viewing the death of their spouses. It was a portal into a new understanding of their lives. A laugh is a lightning bolt of wisdom, a moment in which the individual steps back and gains a broader perspective upon their lives and the human condition.
Finally, our data speak to the social benefits of laughter. Our bereaved individuals who laughed reported better relations with a current significant other. They more readily engaged in new intimate relations.
LAUGHTER=NIRVANA
The Buddha’s path to enlightenment was arduous. He had to leave the comforts of his well-to-do family, his wife, and his new child. He wandered for years grasping for the state of nirvana in different spiritual practices. He nearly died in ascetic practice, starving himself to bone on skin. When the Buddha finally attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree, it was in the realization that the suffering of life is rooted in self-centeredness and desire and that, once shed of such illusions, goodness arises from within. Loving kindness, compassion, right talk and action, peace, and indescribable joys are realized. In this epiphany the Buddha must have deeply exhaled. My bet is that he laughed as well.
Nibbana—nirvana—originally meant “to blow out.” Clearly “blow out” refers to blowing out of the flames of self-interested desire, the obstacle to nirvana. I’d like to think a second possibility is that nirvana means to blow out, to exhale, to laugh.
Images of the Buddha are often images of full-bellied laughter. Study the images of the Dalai Lama with heads of state from around the world and they are all images of body-shifting laughter. The 100 Zen koans amassed in twelfth-and thirteenth-century Japan were used by Buddhist teachers to disengage the conscious rational mind, opening up opportunities for enlightenment. Well-known koans are intentionally paradoxical:
If you meet the Buddha, kill him.
Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?
Many other koans employ absurd humor; they have survived because of their capacity to reduce disciples to laughter:
What is the Buddha? Three pounds of flax.
What is the Buddha? Dried dung.
Laughter may just be the first step to nirvana. When people laugh, they are enjoying a vacation from the conflicts of social living. They are exhaling, blowing out, and their bodies are moving toward a peaceful state, incapable of fight or flight. People see their lives from a different point of view, with new perspective and detachment. Their laughter spreads to others in milliseconds, through the firing of networks of mirror neurons. In shared laughter people touch, they make eye contact, their breathing and muscle actions are in sync, they enjoy the realm of intimate play. Conflicts are softened, and often resolved. Hierarchies negotiated. Attraction and intimacy are created. What was once in the denominator of the jen ratio—conflicts, tensions, frustrations—fades away. People move closer to one another in peaceful ways.
8
Tease
MALE PEACOCKS are well known for their outlandishly beautiful tails—hypnotically patterned signs of their genetic fitness, alluring to the more dowdy and modest peahen. Less well known is how provocative the florid peacock male can be during the ritualized patterns and exchanges of peacock courtship. Often, when an inquiring peahen approaches, he will turn his back on her, as disinterested as the coldest of cold-shouldering high-school girls. He then stretches out his expansive tail to reveal to her inquisitive eyes his backside. What does the peahen get upon expressing initial interest? Very often, a nose brush with the male peacock’s unseemly behind.
Why such a lack of bird decorum? Is the male peacock relying on the rump presentation as a sexual stimulant, as many primate species do, the most dramatic example being the baboon? Not so, reason Amotz and Avishag Zahavi, in their wonderful The Handicap Principle. These ornithologists suggest that the male peacock is simply testing the peahen. He is teasing and provoking her to gather information about her sexual interest. If the female, facing her consort’s derrière, circles around to face the male with alacrity and earnest intent, the male knows that she is interested, and not just playing the field or stop
ping by for a casual exchange of clucks and coos. If she fails to appear, or does so after a few additional milliseconds of dillydallying, he has acquired critical information about her lack of commitment. He can factor this information into his decision about whom to mate with and whom not.
Lest you think that humans have evolved beyond the need to provoke and tease in intimate affairs, consider this exchange between two of literature’s great lovers, Beatrice and Benedick from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. This revealing exchange is their first declaration of their affection for one another.
BENEDICK
And, I pray thee now tell me, for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?
BEATRICE
For them all together, which maintain’d so politic a state of evil that they will not admit any good part to intermingle with them. But for which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?
BENEDICK
Suffer love! A good epithet! I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.
BEATRICE
In spite of your heart, I think. Alas, poor heart, if you spite it for my sake, I will spite it for yours, for I will never love that which my friend hates.
BENEDICK
Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.
The importance of provocation and teasing in our social evolution is suggested by how pervasive teasing is in the animal world. Chimpanzees dangle their tails, tickling noses and eyes, to provoke response in slumbering or distracted chimps nearby. African hunting dogs and dwarf mongooses jump all over each other in piles of playful provocation prior to a hunt, much like pad-slapping football players moments before the kickoff, provoking readiness to attack and defend. In humans, mothers will pull their breast away from weaning babes as they pucker up for a drink. Adults will play hide the face, peekaboo games to stir a sulking child. Teenage girls and boys resort to hostile nicknames and outlandishly gendered imitations to assess the romantic leanings and sexual experiences of their friends. Sexual insults are as reliable an occurrence in human social life as food sharing, greeting gestures, patterns of comfort, flirtation, and the expression of gratitude.
Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Page 15
