Fits of Laughter

I’ve long been prone to peals of laughter. This peaked in childhood, but never ended. I recall a moment in the elementary school gym when a teacher was outraged at my laughing response to something or another, and grabbed my collar, saying through clenched teeth, “You try my patience, kid.” As class president in junior high, I burst into laughter during an auditorium speech, soon echoed by the audience. Another time, I giggled my way through a test of who might be suited for a mechanical-drawing program; what was so funny about the diagrams of objects we were supposed to draw, I couldn’t say.

In ancient times, Democritus was “the laughing philosopher,” contrasted with Heraclitus, “the crying philosopher.” I’m glad to have an alignment with the former. I learned of Democritus when Carl Sagan celebrated him for an outlook prefiguring modern science, as in the statement, “Nothing exists except atoms and the void,” the atheistic implications of which didn’t impede Democritus’ cheerfulness. Heraclitus, for his part, espoused a metaphysics based on fire and conflict, influencing G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx. He avoided acknowledging intellectual debts, instead emphasizing how stupid people generally are. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Heraclitus states: “We might well think of him as the first humanist, were it not for the fact that he does not seem to like humanity very well.”

Sometime in my teen years, my sister, brother and I went to see Pacific Overtures, a Broadway musical about the 1853 forced opening of Japan by U.S. warships commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry. There’s a scene at the end of the first act where a long-haired Perry dances around on stage, making bizarre noises and seeming more animalistic than human; I burst into laughter, spurring my siblings to do the same, to the annoyance of the people around us. We left for intermission and didn’t return.

In adulthood, I’ve had an uproarious response to various situations. One was in Lily Dale, a hamlet in upstate New York known for its spiritual and psychic offerings, including a summer “assembly” that attracts crowds. Knowing my mother would be interested, my wife and I took her there in the late-2000s to hear mediums. We’d recently gotten married and bought a house, circumstances that might’ve been guessable by someone adept at “cold reading,” extrapolations based on a quick sizing-up. One medium on stage zoomed in on my wife in the audience and said he sensed the presence of a departed relative, giving info that suggested a particular grandparent; the advice the medium offered—such as, don’t fret about the unopened boxes in our new house—was pretty good, regardless of where it originated.

Another medium, though, was a woman who walked the aisles tossing out purported names of dead loved ones and problems of the living, getting few hits. Her advice was bad; she told one audience member, a cancer patient, to prioritize “spiritual doctors” over medical ones. She turned to us from a few feet away, with more unfamiliar names and misfired questions, such that my mother, normally an enthusiast of prospective encounters with the extraordinary, was scoffing; I lost it, guffawing loudly with my hands covering my face, and the discomfited medium soon moved on to others in the audience.

Concealing intense laughter is often a failed effort, even if muffling the immediate noise is possible. The belly shakes, and the respiratory system needs to recover. Moreover, there’s a dicey period in which the laughter’s been stifled but could erupt again. The act of trying not to laugh becomes part of what’s funny, or at least seems so until the mania’s died down.

I’ve been known to laugh raucously at movies that aren’t explicitly comedies. These films are often bad, but that’s neither necessary nor sufficient. There are any number of low-quality movies that didn’t elicit laughter, and a few good ones that did. A film of artistic merit, but over-the-top, can spur that effect, as was the case with Werner Herzog’s 1987 Cobra Verde, in which Klaus Kinski veers between fearsome and preposterous as the title character, a 19th-century Brazilian bandit sent to Africa to shore up the slave trade. In an early scene, children scatter screaming as Kinski stalks into the camera frame, and I began a fit of laughter that recurred through much that was crazy and grotesque.

In 2009 I saw The Sky Has Fallen, a low-budget zombie-apocalypse movie I thought was terrible, but which has gained plaudits and a following. It has lots of gory effects, implemented without CGI. It was a midnight showing at the Lighthouse film festival on the Jersey Shore, and I began laughing from an opening moment where a skeletal hand reaches around a tree to threaten a young woman. That the director was sitting a couple of rows away didn’t curtail my mirth, though I approximated a sullen silence by the time the lights came on and the director’s Q&A began in the wee hours of the morning.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election tickled my funny bone, notwithstanding that I regarded it then, and still do, as a terrible development. On the first night or so after the election, I was talking to my friend Dan about what a travesty this was, when suddenly I burst into sustained laughter, overcome by the situation’s absurdity and the folly of the voters who’d brought it to pass. That this con artist had pulled off something he’d seemingly begun as a publicity stunt, was as ludicrous as anything I’d seen in any movie. If Trump wins this November, after a campaign emphasizing retribution and motivated by avoiding prosecution, the consequences will be disastrous, in my view, but I’m likelier to laugh than cry.

—Follow Kenneth Silber on X: @kennethsilber