Why Were They Laughing?

By Kathleen N. Listman

Humor was not my initial intention. Teaching the theory of concept attainment was. My classmates stared at me as I entered the room lugging a heavy wooden post with an ornate realtor’s sign dangling from it. I plopped into the nearest seat, still panting from exertion.

“Who wants to demonstrate their technique first?” The professor asked.

I raised my hand quickly. She often graded the first guinea pig to volunteer with a bit more kindness. Taking a deep breath, I drug my collection of paired objects in front of the ancient black board.

“This one fits what I want,” I stated while flourishing a bright pink Nike with a bold silver swoosh. “And, this one doesn’t.” I lifted up a generic tennis shoe from Walmart. The sharper adults caught on the quickly, unlike the struggling high school students that I usually teach. After exhibiting a few more pairs I assumed my classmates, even the guy yawning in the back, understood the concept of status conferred by logos, so I started the test.

“Does this one fit?” I inquired holding a For Sale placard.

“What do you think about this one?” I hefted the high-class Ebby Halliday Realtor sign.

“It’s stolen.” The guy in the back murmured in a deep voice.

As snickers rolled through the class I imagined I stood in front of high school students again. I took another deep breath, paused, and then continued. A question arose in the back of my mind. Why exactly do we laugh? I am well aware that high school students laugh at anything. This serves a dual purpose of slowing down instruction and drawing attention to themselves at an age when the illusion exists that everyone notices them. However, this classroom contained adults, many exhausted after a full day of teaching.

Thomas Hobbes described laughter as the response of one person trying to express superiority over another. For him humor was always at someone else’s expense—calling attention to other’s faults and foibles in a way that glorified oneself. In an ironic twist, Hobbes indicated that the people who laughed the most were the ones who felt the greatest sense of inferiority. He was not the first to express this superiority theory. Plato recorded a very similar explanation many centuries earlier. Two classic writers with the same idea—maybe the other teachers thought that laughing at me would make them look better.

However, I wanted to believe better of them than that, so I searched for other ideas. In the eighteenth century, Joseph Addison and David Hartley recorded the theory that people responded to incongruities with laughter, such as the humor found in a pun. The gist of a pun is a word with two different meanings. One expressed a resemblance and the other an opposition, which creates a tension that results in the humor. Laughter signals the recognition of this unexpected reversal.

Sigmund Freud had a different take. He focused on the repression of man’s sexual and aggressive drives required by civilized society. Laughter formed an acceptable and pleasurable release from energy bottled up by constant repression. For him, humor was a defense mechanism in which a person could express what they squelched inside in a tolerated manner. Freud’s explanation reminds me of the afternoon of my son’s field trip to the Science Museum. The vice

principal called me because of he didn’t appreciate my son’s treasured Boy Scout skill, the ability to tie secure knots. It had been a cooperative effort, as Jeff and his seat mate became annoyed by the student behind them who refused to stop kicking their seat. With stealth they knotted the student’s shoe laces together so tight they couldn’t be untied and had to be cut.

“Jeff must write a letter of apology.” The vice principal demanded.

“Can I talk with him, first?” I insisted.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I told Chad to stop kicking the seat, but he wouldn’t,” my son explained. In the background the vice principal hissed, “Don’t mention other student’s names!”

“How did you tie Chad’s laces together without him noticing?” I asked a bit perplexed.

“Well, his shoe laces were untied, flopping around. The bus stopped for a while because of all the crowds near the museum. He stood up to look. So, we reached under the seat and tied them together. But we couldn’t see what we were doing, so we accidently tied them around the bar. When he tried to get out, he kept pulling really hard. We could have untied the knot it if he hadn’t done that.”

Chortling, I advised my son to comply. “Just go ahead and write the apology, but don’t tell the vice-principal that I think it’s too funny.”

In my mind I could see the annoying Chad, a regular hyperactive nuisance, who was so unaware didn’t notice the two boys leaning almost to the floor as they tied his laces together. I really did not care if the vice principal heard my laughter over the phone. Loud giggling is more acceptable than berating a vice principal for ignoring a student’s bad behavior.

However, none of these theories really explained one memorable incident. I had joined parents perched on child-sized chairs at a kindergarten performance in a school cafeteria stage. The show was rehearsed, but not rehearsed enough. The teacher scampered out the door to locate missing students in the hall. Meanwhile the fiveyear-olds on stage wiggled impatiently, except for my daughter. She walked directly up to the microphone and giggled. A few people in the chairs laughed back, so she giggled a bit louder, and the crowd responded in kind. This back and forth crescendo of laughter between my child and amused parents continued for a full two minutes before the teacher rushed in to snatch away the microphone.

Years later, still recalling that moment, my daughter informed me that she started laughing because she was nervous, not knowing what to do without the teacher. When the people laughed back, she thought they were pleased, so she kept up the dialog of giggles. “I thought they were laughing with me, not at me. I didn’t know the difference.”

The difference is not clear cut. Although the parents may have laughed at my daughter, they chuckled in a kindly manner and not with the insecure self-promoting air that Hobbes described. Perhaps there was an incongruity, although I could not pinpoint it. Much of the laughter was generated by my daughter’s innocent belief that the crowd wanted to hear her giggle. That could hardly be considered a sociably acceptable way of expressing aggression.

Why were they laughing? Maybe, for a few minutes they laughed simply because it felt good.

Art