An invocation for silliness
When I was 16 years old, I remember cry-laughing almost every day. The kind of laugh that gets you detention in high school. The try-to-hold-it-together-because-we-are-NOT-supposed-to-be-laughing laugh.
We could make anything funny. We’d try dumb shit and say rude stuff.
Being humorous is having good pattern detection skills and saying something that falls outside of the pattern. It’s unpredictability combined with a bit of social risk.
When you get older and you’ve seen a lot of “types” of jokes, you won’t find them funny anymore. Because they are no longer unpredictable. They might be really funny to a lot of other people, but to you it’s like, OK, I’ve seen this before. I recognise the funniness. But sadly it won’t make me giggle like a 16 year old dork.
I still laugh like that every once in a while, but it’s much less common, like every few months.
Maybe I’m misattributing my loss of sense of humour to the wrong thing? Maybe I just became a “serious person”. Maybe I stopped laughing at things because I became bitter? Or because I feel like we should be discussing “serious topics” instead of riffing on about absurd hypothetical situations?
I WANT to giggle like a 16 year old dork though. In fact, that’s one of the supreme joys in life. Am I not allowing myself to giggle in fear of social rejection? I do take myself too seriously. Part of opening up to people, to being vulnerable is laughing together.
Of course opinions become stronger when you get older. When you’re in high school, you all have roughly the same worldview. Then you learn more about the world and opinions diverge. And humour becomes more specific, and more risky. It’s easier to offend people.
You become more aware of social conventions and try to appease everyone. But by doing that you become bland and unoriginal. By trying not to offend anyone, you stop being interesting.
This is more pronounced in today’s culture. Social media has made everyone more extreme in their views, and at the same time, within the social circle it became less OK to stray outside of those views. Which makes everything very tribal.
Is that causing us to laugh less?
I’m tired of that. I want to risk saying stupid shit again. I want to be silly and act as if the whole world’s a stage and I’m just an actor.
I want to belly laugh, tears streaming down my eyes. Like a mad man.
