Our first finding lent support to this view of laughter. Measures of laughter (and smiling) predicted reduced grief as assessed at six, fourteen, and twenty-five months postloss. Those participants who showed pleasurable, Duchenne laughter while talking about their deceased spouses were less anxious and depressed, and more engaged in their daily living, for the next two years. Just as important, people who showed more anger were observed to be experiencing more anxiety, depression, and disengagement from daily living for the next two years.
A first objection one might raise with respect to these findings concerns the nature of the death. Perhaps those individuals who laughed had partners who experienced easier deaths and thereby felt less initial grief and, as a result, were better able to adjust to this difficult loss. We know from empirical studies of bereavement that the nature of the death matters—sudden deaths, and deaths that produce greater financial demands upon the spouse, lead to prolonged grief and difficulty readjusting. We also know that the severity of the individual’s initial grief powerfully predicts the degree of difficulty in adjusting that that person will experience later. These possibilities did not explain away the benefits of laughter: Those individuals who showed pleasurable laughter compared to those who did not did not differ in the nature of their spouse’s death (its unexpectedness or financial impact) nor in their initial levels of grief.
One might likewise argue that perhaps our individuals who laughed at death were just happier individuals to begin with. Perhaps our results linking laughter to adjustment were simply the products of the temperamental happiness of the individual and not the emotional dynamics and perspective shifts accompanying laughter. This alternative too proved untenable—our people who laughed did not differ on any conventional measure of dispositional happiness from our individuals who did not laugh.
Buoyed by these findings, George and I went on a search for further evidence in support of the benefits of laughter. Why did laughing while talking about the deceased partner relate to increased personal adjustment? What we observed were findings very much in keeping with the laughter as vacation hypothesis. Our first analysis looked at how bereaved individuals’ experience of distress tracked one physiological index of arousal—elevated heart rate. The bereaved individuals who laughed showed similar heart rate arousal as those who did not laugh. But whereas our nonlaughers’ feelings of distress closely tracked increases in their heart rate, our laughers’ feelings of distress were decoupled from this physiological index of stress. Metaphorically, laughers were taking a vacation from the stress of their partners’ deaths, freed from the tension of stress-related physiology.
We then transcribed their conversations and identified exactly what the bereaved participants were talking about when they laughed. Here again, data suggest that laughter is not a sign of denial of trauma, as widely assumed, but an indicator of a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination. We coded participants’ references to several existential themes related to bereavement—loss, yearning, injustice, uncertainty. We also coded for insight words that reflect a shift in perspective, phrases like “I see” or “from this perspective” or “looking back.” Our participants who laughed were most likely to be talking about the injustice of death—the unfair termination of life, the difficulties of raising a family alone, the loss of intimacy—but they engaged in this discourse with perspective-shifting clauses. Laughter was part of these individuals’ shift in viewing the death of their spouses. It was a portal into a new understanding of their lives. A laugh is a lightning bolt of wisdom, a moment in which the individual steps back and gains a broader perspective upon their lives and the human condition.
Finally, our data speak to the social benefits of laughter. Our bereaved individuals who laughed reported better relations with a current significant other. They more readily engaged in new intimate relations.
LAUGHTER=NIRVANA
The Buddha’s path to enlightenment was arduous. He had to leave the comforts of his well-to-do family, his wife, and his new child. He wandered for years grasping for the state of nirvana in different spiritual practices. He nearly died in ascetic practice, starving himself to bone on skin. When the Buddha finally attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree, it was in the realization that the suffering of life is rooted in self-centeredness and desire and that, once shed of such illusions, goodness arises from within. Loving kindness, compassion, right talk and action, peace, and indescribable joys are realized. In this epiphany the Buddha must have deeply exhaled. My bet is that he laughed as well.
Nibbana—nirvana—originally meant “to blow out.” Clearly “blow out” refers to blowing out of the flames of self-interested desire, the obstacle to nirvana. I’d like to think a second possibility is that nirvana means to blow out, to exhale, to laugh.
Images of the Buddha are often images of full-bellied laughter. Study the images of the Dalai Lama with heads of state from around the world and they are all images of body-shifting laughter. The 100 Zen koans amassed in twelfth-and thirteenth-century Japan were used by Buddhist teachers to disengage the conscious rational mind, opening up opportunities for enlightenment. Well-known koans are intentionally paradoxicaclass="underline"
If you meet the Buddha, kill him.
Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?
Many other koans employ absurd humor; they have survived because of their capacity to reduce disciples to laughter:
What is the Buddha? Three pounds of flax.
What is the Buddha? Dried dung.
Laughter may just be the first step to nirvana. When people laugh, they are enjoying a vacation from the conflicts of social living. They are exhaling, blowing out, and their bodies are moving toward a peaceful state, incapable of fight or flight. People see their lives from a different point of view, with new perspective and detachment. Their laughter spreads to others in milliseconds, through the firing of networks of mirror neurons. In shared laughter people touch, they make eye contact, their breathing and muscle actions are in sync, they enjoy the realm of intimate play. Conflicts are softened, and often resolved. Hierarchies negotiated. Attraction and intimacy are created. What was once in the denominator of the jen ratio—conflicts, tensions, frustrations—fades away. People move closer to one another in peaceful ways.
8 Tease
MALE PEACOCKS are well known for their outlandishly beautiful tails—hypnotically patterned signs of their genetic fitness, alluring to the more dowdy and modest peahen. Less well known is how provocative the florid peacock male can be during the ritualized patterns and exchanges of peacock courtship. Often, when an inquiring peahen approaches, he will turn his back on her, as disinterested as the coldest of cold-shouldering high-school girls. He then stretches out his expansive tail to reveal to her inquisitive eyes his backside. What does the peahen get upon expressing initial interest? Very often, a nose brush with the male peacock’s unseemly behind.
Why such a lack of bird decorum? Is the male peacock relying on the rump presentation as a sexual stimulant, as many primate species do, the most dramatic example being the baboon? Not so, reason Amotz and Avishag Zahavi, in their wonderful The Handicap Principle. These ornithologists suggest that the male peacock is simply testing the peahen. He is teasing and provoking her to gather information about her sexual interest. If the female, facing her consort’s derrière, circles around to face the male with alacrity and earnest intent, the male knows that she is interested, and not just playing the field or stopping by for a casual exchange of clucks and coos. If she fails to appear, or does so after a few additional milliseconds of dillydallying, he has acquired critical information about her lack of commitment. He can factor this information into his decision about whom to mate with and whom not.