People Don’t Know This, But Laughter Is Actually The Way My Body Responds To Pain
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding Thursday’s episode of the “Tonight Show,” which featured Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Many in the media have suggested that the show was a missed opportunity to hold the candidate’s feet to the fire, and that my tousling his hair and laughing through the interview with him was an embarrassing, even spineless display.
I wanted to step back for a moment and clarify exactly why I was laughing during Thursday’s show.
Since ancient times, there have been countless explanations put forth for why we humans laugh.
In his Republic, Plato suggested that laughter was an outpouring of emotion that overrode rational self-control. Early Christian leaders like Ambrose, Jerome and Basil similarly linked laughter to a loss of self-control, as well as idleness, lust and anger.
Freud believed that laughter was the release of large stores of psychic energy caused by repressed thoughts entering the conscious mind.
Most recently, some ethologists have suggested that the staccato panting emitted by apes during mock-fighting is the evolutionary origin of human laughter, and that laughing is an involuntary bodily response that signals play.
To this day, our philosophers, psychologists and biologists cannot come up with a definitive explanation for why it is that we humans laugh.
That is, all humans except for me.
You see, due to a unique quirk in my neurology, laughter is actually the way that my body responds to extreme pain.
Whenever I stub my toe, slip on the floor, or get hit in the head with a plank of wood, my body’s immediate instinct is to break out in raucous laughter. Painful breakups, sports injuries and internal bleeding all elicit deep belly laughs in me.
I won’t get into details about the specific source of my pain on Thursday night, but just know: whenever I am laughing hard, it is because my body is having an involuntary reaction to some intense physical pain.
It might look like I’m having fun up there, but really I am in complete agony.
If I could, I would be up there convulsing in horror and crying out loud for help. “Let it be over,” I might scream. Instead, I convulse in a deep, painful laughter, in a state of complete submission to the yuks.
Think about that next time you make fun of me and my brand of so-called “lighthearted” humour. What might look to you like a silly, pandering “comedy show” is actually an endurance act, an evening-long contest between me and the most terrible agony known to man.
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