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Today, We LAUGH Differently…
Our laughter has evolved in the last 25 years and that reveals a lot about our current culture
Did you have a good laugh today? Do you remember what it was about? I’d like to propose that what we laugh about today, can say a lot about our cultural condition. Like the frog in boiling water, our reason (and reasoning) for laughing has shifted in the last twenty five years. Recognizing it might find us a way out… and that ain’t no laughing matter.
A number of years ago I was watching an interview with Robert Redford on one of those Network Morning Shows. Redford is more than an actor, he’s a prolific director and producer, and the founder of the Sundance Film Festival. In the midst of asking about the latest movie he was starring in or directing, the interviewer asked him what he thought of our movies today. Without skipping a beat, he said, “When it comes to movies, today we laugh differently.”
That stuck with me in that moment: “Today, we laugh differently.” It wasn’t just a reflection on the movie industry and its digital offerings, but a reflection on us as a culture. Our reasons for something as physiologically necessary and essentially profound as laughter had changed significantly.
For a second let’s talk about our need for laughter. We’ve all heard that laughter is the best medicine, right? The mayoclinic.org states that laughter has both long and short-term benefits. In the short term, laughter enhances our intake of oxygen-rich air, which stimulates our organs to perform better, while it increases endorphin release in the brain. Long term, it can even improve your immune system and relieve pain. Yes laughter can produce natural pain killers.
While we need laughter to properly function as human beings, what allows us to function better (our forms of laughter) has shifted. Whether that is an evolution, or devolution, I’ll let you decide. I will document six ways we are now laughing differently and let you see where we each fall into the mix. The factors for this change are myriad: from the pandemic, to social media, to a shift in Hollywood 25 years ago, and I may document that more in detail. For now, I’ll just present the new ways we extract laughter from our stories and circumstances, and if you want me…
