I make a mental note when I hear someone say “I’m going up to see Bob,” or “Take this up to Bob.” In these sentences, Bob is described as “up” but many times he is down. Downstairs. Downtown. People refer to people as upstairs when in fact they are downstairs, or right in front of them and at precisely the same level.

It’s not always office politics of bureaucracies that spur this kind of thinkspeak. I believe that in the above situation the person feels that Bob is somehow superior, and refers to him as “up” even when physical evidence contradicts such a description.

Once I read a memo from a boss who said that “I have submitted the paperwork to the people upstairs.” It made me laugh. He did not refer to them by name or as anything but “the people upstairs.” In that case the people really were upstairs, but if you pay attention sometimes you’ll hear people refer to someone as being upstairs or downstairs when in fact the opposite is true. It is simply FASCINATING.

Up or down. That’s a slight nuance in people’s speech, but I think it’s revealing.

For instance, discomfort ensues when someone laughs too hard at a joke. I know this from experience. Once in a while I make a little wisecrack, and someone who hears it doesn’t just chuckle. They laugh until they get sick. They call me on the phone the next day, tears still streaming from their eyes, to say that I made them laugh so much that their stomach and sides are painfully sore.

I go along with it, act like I’m really a amusing guy, but I know that my joke was not that funny, and that either this person laughed to expel demons from some untreated corner of his mind or the comment I made referred to some subject in such a way that it exposed tensions in the person’s mind. He was either unaware what he was reacting to or he was painfully aware and chose to hide behind laughter as a disguise.

Laughter and people’s reasons for laughing can open a window into the dirty parts of someone’s soul.

At times people will find things funny in ways that I had not considered, and consequently they might laugh a bit longer than I at some comment or other. This doesn’t bother me, since in that case an offhand comment could well deserve laughter heartier than intended.

It’s the chortling and the cough-up-a-lung type of laughter that concerns me.

I don’t consider laughter to be a pleasurable human gesture. From what I’ve read on the subject, there appears to be no medical or physiological reason for laughter to occur.

Smiling is pleasurable, I will grant you that. Or rather it reflects a pleasurable reaction to something. But smiling does not equate with laughter simply because they look similar. In fact I would bet that the faces of laughing people right at the moment they start laughing, if you freeze them at that instant, would look nothing like a smile. More like a horrified gasp or blood-curdling scream.

I was at a party once with a friend. He was talking to a woman and he made some amusing comment, and her laugh consisted of a tiny “argh!” noise punctuated with what could only be described as an emphatic frown. It was the sort of upside-down-smile you see in situations of ghastly revulsion. I still have that facial expression emblazoned on my mind, and I saw it nearly 15 years ago.

I nursed this theory about laughter for years and was disappointed to discover that it is not new or original to me. Freud’s Relief Theory, from 1905, says pretty much what I just said -- that laughter functions as a release of nervous tension -- he's just smarter.

Whether it’s called Relief Theory or My Theory, recognizing that laughter is symptomatic of tension has made me think about the things people laugh at. There’s sexuality, ethnicity, intelligence. Or maybe it’s safer to say people laugh at comments which could be interpreted as targeting those issues.

I don’t know if I could reduce it to a single list, but I would guess that the range of things that make me laugh is as broad as that of anyone else who laughs at anything.

I laugh at jokes which illustrate people’s overblown perceptions of themselves. I laugh at anything which outs people whose self-image is off base.

I do not laugh at people, though. If I am in the company of a person who thinks very highly of herself I don’t generally find it funny. Generally I don't care one way or the other. But I laugh at comments and cartoons which use human arrogance and dysfunctional corporate bureaucracies as the butt of the joke.

I don’t know if there is a connection between laughter and superiority. If there is I don’t think the connection is necessarily derisive. If a person only laughs *at* other people, then I think this reflects not derisiveness or malice but the nervousness of someone who is ill at ease with their position in life. This can be interpreted (not unreasonably) as derisive. Or that person could just be an asshole.

Laughter, as far as I can tell, almost never signifies pleasure. In fact one of the most uncomfortable questions you can ever be asked is “Why are you laughing at that?” You find that your laughter evaporates as you try to grasp for an explanation that will satisfy the person who asked you. And you get a quick stinging feeling that your laughter has exposed your ignorance in some matter.

Recognizing that laughter is related to stress makes me question some of the things I laugh at.

Here are some things which have recently made me laugh.

At a fast food restaurant a man is placing a large order for his family: several burgers, several orders of fries, Cokes – and an order of mozzarella sticks.

The cashier taking the order is repeating the order back to the customer. “6 cheeseburgers, 6 regular fries…” Then, as clearly as one could enunciate: “...and an order of monsterella sticks.”

That word, “Monsterella,” made me chuckle.

The customer changed the order several times, and the cashier read the order back 4 or 5 times. Every single time she clearly said “monsterella” and enunciated the word more and more clearly and emphatically every time she said it, and it made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

Why did I laugh at this? Am I particularly uneasy about literacy and articulateness? Or was it that cashier’s innocence and purity of speech that made her seem preposterous? She had a certain air of superiority about her. I imagined that she saw herself as something of an authority figure there in her uniform and being in charge of the money in the cash register.

Another very different incident: A friend e-mails me an image that he found on the Internet. The subject line of the e-mail is a question: “Mark – Is this Jessica?” I look at the image, which is of a woman performing oral sex on a man. The man’s face is not shown, but as my friend suggested with his question the woman’s face very clearly resembles Jessica, a mutual acquaintance of ours.

I look at the image for several seconds, trying to tell if it’s really her. My phone rings. I pick it up, and it’s the friend who sent me the picture.

“I think it’s her,” he says.

I asked “Where’d you find this?” I chose the word “find” to imply that he actively sought out pornography. I laughed.

“Usenet,” he replied.

“Well, it definitely looks like her,” I said. “But I don’t know. She’s kinda hard to recognize…”I paused for a second, then simultaneously we finished the sentence: “…with a cock in her mouth!” and we laughed and laughed.

This made me laugh longer than I’ve laughed in a long, long time. For days I turned that sentence over and over in my mind “She’s kinda hard to recognize … with a cock in her mouth!” I laughed not just at the crude truthfulness of the statement but at the way we said it at the same moment, as if on cue, and then both laughed for many minutes.

A third incident: I’m walking past a strip mall near my apartment, and I see signs for 2 separate stores. “LIQUORS” and “CLEANERS.” I’ve walked past those signs many times but this was the first time I read them as “LICKERS” and “CLEANERS.” I laughed out loud, walking on 21st Street by myself. “How handy,” I thought. “The lickers and the cleaners are right next door to each other. They should put a comma between their store names.”

I can not find any concrete reason to have laughed at that, except that the 2 words just sounded funny next to each other, and the idea of a professional licking establishment is funny funny funny.

I laugh at word play, especially when it produces gibberish. My mind is a restless hive of word play, with spoonerisms, palindromes and anagrams crawling all over each other and consuming much of my precious little mental energy.

Well, there are a lot of stories I could tell about things that have made me laugh recently. I laugh a lot, probably more than most people, and whether or not it is my intention I have a way of making people around me laugh and laugh and laugh. Some of the happiest moments of my life have been those in which I made a room filled with people laugh. It’s one of the greatest feelings I know.

What is the point of this essay? How should I know? Maybe the point is simply to say that the next time you find yourself laughing too hard, stop and think about it. Maybe it’s not that funny.

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