The Power Dynamic of Laughter

he who laughs first loses

This episode is full of stories so I’m going to try to tempt you to watch it. Stories really are better told. I start with my middle daughter’s new boyfriend, who is funny, complimentary, easy to be with … but doesn’t really laugh at her jokes. I give my youngest daughter Cassandra’s theory: the schoolyard training among boys that withholding laughter is power. If other people laugh at your jokes, they give you power. But if you laugh at others’ jokes, you give that power away. This is especially true, she says, for those on the fringes who aren’t the popular kids and athletes.

According to Cassandra, being funny makes men more attractive to women but men like women who laugh, not women who are funny. Men tend to laugh at the jokes of other men. If you’re British, this is even stronger. And if you went to an all-boy’s school, you’re pretty much doomed.

There are some exceptions: Irish guys and gay guys. My middle daughter was adopted as ‘one of the lads’ by her Irish coworkers. Her housemate is an Irish-Jamaican bodybuilder bartender … woman. I had you fooled there, didn’t I? She demonstrates that Irish women are not thin-skinned and can dish it back with the best of them.

Her other close friend from middle school is gay. Gay guys find women funny because they’re not competing with them or around them. They can relax and be themselves.

Another exception is homeschooled boys like the one my oldest married after dating for ten years. In HS, she befriended a different guy who’d been homeschooled and she described him as a turtle without a shell. She once asked what kind of music he liked and he said “Mozart and Taylor Swift.” She admonished him to never utter those words again or they would eat him alive.

But with ten years to train her husband in the art of repartee, he’s caught on a little too eagerly. There are times she’s had to say, “Woah, buddy. Too far!”

---

There is a fine line between ribbing and ridicule or mean-funny. Cassandra is also my social media advisor and warned me when I started my vlog that being mean is catching—even if someone really deserves it, even if what you have to say is really funny. Once you start, your audience will do it too and, sooner or later, it will turn on you. Don’t start.

Mean funny is different than meme funny. The best memes pull the rug out from under your expectations, have shock value, surprise, outrageousness that makes you think, “Oh I shouldn’t laugh at this but I can’t help it!” They make fun of behaviors, not individuals. They make you just a little squirmy and uncomfortable.

Glenn Greenwald talked recently about the kind of debate that annihilates your opponent with scathing ridicule. He said he was good at this, on the debate team in college, and that it was a big part of what made him famous. But at some point, he felt like a trained monkey throwing shit, and decided not to do that kind of interview.

I remember hearing Jon Stewart say the same. People loved it when he demolished his opponent. But he decided it didn’t move the conversation forward.

---

On the other hand, I’ve been talking about religions that don’t joke around, especially about sex. I’ve realized that severe prohibitions on sex are really about the enslavement or repression of women, a dictator in every home. In most cases, certainly a benevolent dictator but a dictator all the same.

Ratio Broadbornius, King of Memes, just posted these that illustrate the point:

I may have to send that last one to my ex.

My daughters have an uncle who skates that line between ribbing and ridicule. It’s a rite of passage for any boyfriend to be grilled by him. He and my ex have that guy relationship of laughing at each others jokes. I remember this particularly on the last Christmas before the divorce. They were playing Pictionary and laughing uproariously because they were cheating and still couldn’t beat the vulcan mindmeld daughters who could draw one line and get The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Would I have preferred that people tiptoe around and speak in hushed voices that family, as we knew it, would never be the same? Well … there could have been a little more of that. But in retrospect, it was a fitting end to an era because my role in the family was as the One Who Laughs, and the one who serves, which is kind of the same.

---

In my next era, at the age of 58, I got to be funny. And all because I found my group of dancers, women who laughed. This group is led by Gina, who is outrageously funny, mostly with physical humor. Part of our teacher training is how to molest students without scaring them away.

During the lockdowns we raided my costume boxes and bins of toys and stuffed animals as props for Zoom classes. We did the Muppet song with Gina as Animal, and Jane Fonda workouts. We did The Lion Sleeps Tonight with jungle animals prancing across the screen. And on the night of the lightning fires, when some of our group didn’t know if their houses would be there in the morning, Gina re-enacted the Titanic farewell scene, complete with violinist. Gina goes right to the edge of too far … and we love her for it.

But not everyone loves her for it. The virtue-signaling vice-patrol joy-police were out in full force. The police stopped us from dancing in the park, due to a grumpy complaint, grumbling that they really had better things to do. At the start of a Zoom class with a Rasta theme, one dancer said, “I’m concerned that this is cultural appropriation,” killing the vibe.

After the class I asked that student about the difference between cultural appreciation and appropriation, especially for someone like Gina who’s spent her life bring the dances of the world to people who want to learn them. Curiously this was someone who worked for a major food magazine with recipes from all nations. Imagine how boring our cuisine would be without cultural appropriation!

---

I think the wet blanket cancel culture is another way of asserting your superiority, your authority. It’s a power play saying, “I’m the adult in the room. You kids are having too much fun.” Stop laughing, it’s not funny!

In closing, I believe that some people are a little more alive than others. And they bring people around them a little more to life too. We’re drawn to those people, not like moths to a flame, but like sunflowers to the sun. Sunflowers that burst into suns.

I find this quality of being a little more genuine, a little more alive often goes along with being a little bit broken. People in my dance class have been through some intense shit, gone to that place where you realize none of this shit matters. There’s a lack of judgment, a sense of “Bring your whole self. And we’ll grind on it.”

I’m going to my dance class now and I’ll be coming back a little more alive. When I do, I’ll share that with you. Because life, like laughter, like love, only gives you more when you give it away.

---

The inspiration for this episode is the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. They cite ‘The Bad Popcorn Study’ and why you don't have a people problem; Chocolate Chip Cookies vs Radishes and willpower exhaustion; and how to direct the Rider and motivate the Elephant. I apply these to our mission to change the global economy to enable communities to be self-reliant. In the process, I bring in the world's best flourless chocolate cake, my daughter's wedding, my leaky refrigerator, and aerial ballet Buddhas.

My daughter Cassandra has a new question, "what's the best that can happen?" I apply this to global events and the coup to take over our bodies, minds and world. I share some of the things that give me joy: Rob Brezsny's Love Bombs, Wendall Berry's The Power of Place, David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, and Caitlin Johnstone's Confused Species in an Awkward Transition Phase.