LAUGHTER TO BOOST YOUR RELATIONSHIPS
Laughter is a highly sophisticated social signaling system, helping people bond and even negotiate. Interestingly, most social laughter does not result from any obvious joke.
Why does joke work? Because it relies on inference. At the start of the sentence, we mentally extrapolate the direction it’s going in, only to discover that we’ve been taken down a path to an unexpected conclusion.
Getting a laugh is a subtle and complicated business, not a paint-by-numbers process. Any professional comedian knows the same joke can work one night and flop the next.
Laughter just might be the most contagious of all emotional experiences. What's more, it is a full-on collaboration between mind and body. Although laughter is one of the distinguishing features of human beings, little is known about the mechanisms behind it.
Genuine humour requires us to read the context of a situation, pick the right tone, and choose our pauses. Sometimes no words are needed; a look is enough.
In 25 years of observation, I have found that people are funnier when they are more "present." This is consistent with the principle of "flow," defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as the state in which we experience complete concentration, involvement and exuberance in the current moment.
Of course, laughter doesn’t always have a connection to humor. It can be nervous (as in job interviews), diplomatic (as in conversations with your CEO), evil (as per Hollywood villains), or fake (to cover up when you haven’t heard what someone said). In other words, it serves a multitude of social purposes.
Robert Provine, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, believes that laughter may have pre-dated human speech by millions of years, hardwiring it into the human brain in the process. The fact that laughter arrives well before speech for babies, and manifests in every culture, proves that it is an instinctive and universal mechanism.
Based on a sample of 1,200 laughter episodes, Provine and his team studied the placement of laughter in the speech stream, and found it isn’t random. Rather than breaking the phrase structure, laughter occupies the same spaces as punctuation marks. For example, a speaker may say “Are you out again tonight? Ha-ha,” but seldom “Are you out, ha-ha, again tonight?” Provine concluded that laughter is "neurologically orchestrated," meaning that we follow conventions about placement without conscious consideration.
Before the laughter-gauging brain scans, study participants observed their close friends laughing out loud as they watched comedy clips for 30 minutes. In a separate baseline experiment, the same participants spent 30 minutes alone in a sterile, laughter-free laboratory setting. Contagious social laughter was found to stimulate endorphin release in the thalamus, caudate nucleus, and anterior insula.
Weekday night at Mumbai’s popular comedy destination, Canvas Laugh Club. The lights dim, the red décor fades to black, a round of applause goes out and Jaideep Singh Juneja takes the stage. It’s a packed house.
His is a new act but neither his tone nor body language gives that away. Juneja grins, greets his audience and begins the 15-minute set. The 26-year-old talks about his experiences at dating, pokes fun at communities, the lines punctuated with profanities. But the best of his punchlines are reserved for his own tribe: “Sardars between the age of 15 and 40 all look the same, but the problem is we all look 40.” The audience already loves him.
When he starts with a dig at inter-caste marriage, though, someone in the audience has already taken offence. Juneja quickly pacifies him. “Hear me out, and if you don’t like the joke, you get a refund,” he says.
Going on, Juneja says many problems of his childhood are because his mother is a South Indian and his dad a Sikh. “Kundi in Punjabi refers to a latch while in Tamil it means the posterior. When I went to Chennai, I told the maid, ‘Madam, zara kundi kholna’,” he says. Up comes a collective guffaw from the audience and the detractor, too, is laughing.
Disclaimer : The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice .All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensue discussion or debate.
Thank you … Although laughter is not generally under voluntary control, yukking it up has numerous health benefits: It releases tension, lowers anxiety, boosts the immune system, and aids circulation. Contagious convulsions are anything but frivolous.
We don't laugh because we're happy, we're happy because we laugh.
Although philosophers and psychologists have speculated about the role that laughter plays in social bonding for eons, until recently, there was relatively little empirical evidence that explained why laughter is contagious for most of us. Or, the neural reasons some people are immune to the laughter contagion. That said, in the past few months, researchers have finally pinpointed some neuroscience -based answers to the million-dollar question: "Why is laughter contagious?"
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Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.