NOTHING IS FUNNY

April 5th, 2019

Young children will often laugh for no obvious reason.  Parents of children or teachers, siblings, and relatives will notice this if given enough time together.

The so called ‘adult’ will usually raise a jaded eyebrow with a bemused smile and detach with a conclusive ohhhh-kay.

The children are growing.  They haven’t developed their sense of humor.  Or something like that is proposed as the explanation.  We might wonder if such an explanation is actually true, or is it a kind of reasoned excuse to circumvent our embarrassed inability to jump in and take part in the fun?

Comedy can be a wonderful therapy.  Someone who has had no good reason to laugh in a long time can easily feel renewed when a friend drags them out to a good comedy show.  The jokes inevitably have little relation to one’s personal life and yet one can easily achieve a totally new perspective on life by benefit of a few punch lines.

Perhaps some people consciously or unconsciously withhold their willingness to laugh in an effort to seem more completely jaded or to display an intellect that is only broken by the smartest and wittiest of novel ideas.

One might wonder if such people are doing themselves a disservice by withholding their minds from the beneficial salve of laughter. 

We might wonder further about a connection between health and a willingness to laugh:  who is more likely to be healthier?  The person with a high threshold of humor, or the individual who will laugh at almost anything?

Regardless of the propensities that genetics and circumstance have handed us, we can always consciously invoke a smile.  The simple act, if sustained can change one’s mood, and often our mood, our current emotion is the biggest factor holding us back from what we’d be better off doing.

Just as kids can exercise the capacity to laugh even though nothing present is particularly funny, we too can hack our own head and smile for the mere sake of smiling, or rather for the contribution such an action makes to our overall brain chemistry, and any subsequent change in our perspective. 

Consciously failing to take things too seriously can free up our perspective in order to see that key missing detail that allows everything to suddenly come together.