See, a real honest-to-god laugh dismantles all the defenses we’ve built up to survive the complexities of social life, and does so with no less than the greatest of ease. Your self-restraint, your anxieties, your vanity, your aspirations, your pride, and your despair all disappear for that moment when you have a genuine, no-bullshit, certified-as-authentic laugh. It’s a brief moment of enlightenment that comes without your permission; a sneeze of joy, a hiccup of bliss. In a fleeting flash, you hold nothing back. Your outward actions match your inner emotions. You become honest without intention, and it’s in the running for “Most Beautiful Thing Of All Time”.
I’m not talking about the odd world of evil laughs or those laughs of assholes getting their kicks at someone else’s expense (assholes that I know we all are from time to time). I’m talking about the good laughs. The ones that come as we connect the disparate dots of life in unexpected ways. The ones where we laugh at our own ridiculousness and that silliness inherent to our group of friends, our family, our country, our species, our genus, our phylum, or our kingdom. The ones that reach out and pull us closer together.
But a forced laugh? A fake laugh? A sympathetic laugh? Woe be unto those who would do such a thing. They desecrate the holy. They profess their love without having it in their hearts. They’re frauds faking something that’s nothing if it’s not honest. They give you a beautifully bowed and ravishingly wrapped box with nothing inside and give themselves another star sticker for being so magnanimous.
At its best, a forced laugh is an attempt at positive reinforcement; rewarding their friend or their coworker or a performer or a stranger-they’re-trying-to-fool-into-being-a-friend with the trimmings of Human Connection without the substance. A fake laugh, at its most admirable, says “There was a lot that was funny about that, not funny enough for me to laugh mind you, but funny enough for me to want you to keep trying to entertain me and certainly funny enough to prevent the possibility of awkwardness. So I’ll give you an advance on a laugh in the hope that I’ll be able to recoup my investment later.” Sure, it might be a white lie but it casts a dark shadow when its caught. It stings much worse than silence, or “I don’t get it.” It cheapens the interaction and makes the recipient of the forgery feel like they’re being bought off in the same way they would if they’d slept with someone on what they thought was a date only to be offered money when they expected a kiss goodbye.
Full disclosure: I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I most often do it when I’ve lost track of what someone is saying while a drift in my own thoughts, but, upon checking back in, find their cadence to indicate that it’s time for me to laugh. Those are the times that I most often give in to the convenience of this crime. You might say I’m a hypocrite; I say I’m breaking my own heart.
