Laughter is commonly seen as a good thing that makes us happy and brings people together. It releases endorphins that have all kinds of health benefits and can even prolong our lifespans. Recently, I've been playing the rpg Deltarune developed by TobyFox. My favorite character in the game so far by a long shot is named Ralsei. He's one of the main characters. He's a gentle, kind, and supportive goat prince thing and I've been kind of obsessed with him. He comes across as super wholesome and he has a good sense of humor in my opinion
One thing I noticed about him though is that he pretty much never laughs. I tried researching it a bit and I think he has never laughed at all throughout the game. He smiles a lot though, probably more than any other character. It got me wondering about the true nature of laughter, why we even laugh in the first place. It got me reading some research papers. Overall, it's pretty inconclusive as to why we laugh but the most interesting explanations I found are that we mostly laugh when we make some kind of error in what we predicted to happen, and also as a coping mechanism. The implications for this are huge
If we usually laugh when something happens that doesn't line up with what we expected, then that would explain why laughter often comes across as judgmental. In order for our expectations to be wrong, we would need to have expectations in the first place. There's less laughter in judgment free zones like in therapy and rehab because people are just accepting us how we are.
I've begun to see more and more things that I'd normally laugh at as kind of poor taste lately, and I haven't been laughing much. I still do smile a lot and try to be silly when I can get away with it. I've noticed that since making this change, I've felt more confident in social situations. No more nervous laughter. No more laughing at other people's expense, no more laughing to cope with feeling uncomfortable, no more "It's just a joke." I still wanna try to find harmless things that make sense for me personally to laugh at, but lately I've not found much of anything