The laughter disease

Of all the habits that I inherited from my father, among the worst is my tendency to laugh uncontrollably at the most inappropriate of moments. Most recently, the urge to laugh has struck me while at couple's therapy with my wife, when moments of "serious" "reflection" turn into moments in which I struggle vigorously (and largely unsuccessfully) against the urge to laugh or at least smile. In the moments in which we are supposed to be the most serious and the most stolid, my brain tells my body to laugh.

We recently tuned into an HBO tribute to George Carlin, where we saw a bit he did about class clowns. He commented that everything the class clown did was made doubly funny by the fact that he made his jokes in school, where we're all supposed to be on our very best behavior. The moments in which we are expected to be stolid are the moments most ripe for humor: the mere act of breaking the silence and interrupting with something "inappropriate" is funny in and of itself; the awkwardness, tension, and discomfort that arises from a moment of forced quiet begs to be interrupted with some rude noise, some out-of-place gesture to relieve us. It is a genetic weakness of mine that, in these moments, I feel the tension so intensely, and seek relief so desperately, that I cannot physically control the impulse to laugh.

My most egregious offense of inappropriate laughter came about a year and a half ago, at the funeral of a fairly distant relative. Because I was not very close to this particular relative, I was free from much of the grief that others in my family felt, and which would have probably prevented any less-than-serious sounds from exiting my mouth. But, things being the way they were, I sat close to the back of the room during the visitation and funeral, standing and shaking hands and giving hugs and expressions of sympathy when called for. Generic instrumental music played unobtrusively in the background: things like "Wind Beneath My Wings," presented by the Mannheim Steamroller.

The "service" began when a funeral home employee put in a cassette of a recording of a contemporary Christian tune called something like "You Rescue Me" or "You Lift Me Up," which was a tearjerking piece marked by three emotion-laden verses followed by three soaring, timpani-assisted crescendos leading into a near-operatic chorus. The idea was that we were meant to just sit quietly and listen to this song, allowing the tune to serve its function of bringing out the tears. And it really worked: there were people crying all over the place, including several who I'm pretty sure barely knew this relative. But it was, to me, a very awkward moment, because we were all expected to just suspend normalcy for a moment and become "lost" in this very over-the-top recording. For me to have followed queue would have been so out of character, and I felt like the same was true for many of the other people there.

I fought the urge for nervous laughter throughout this song, which seemed to last 10 minutes, but, as the third crescendo began to swell, I lost it. The laughter, like vomit, began to rise from my stomach and lungs, and there was nothing I could do to make it go away. A terrible, cough-like hack emerged from my mouth, as I shamefully and frantically lowered my face to look toward the floor, trying to suppress the flow of air and noise. I closed my mouth as tight as I could, as the remainder of the laugh trembled in my throat, registering as a strange, frenetic mumble that I hoped and prayed could be read as a muffled sob. But it was all very audible, and all very terrible

As the song ended, and the preacher began his words, I hung my head low to the ground, sure that someone close-by was feeling hurt and outrage over my insensitivity. I envisioned a terrible scene in which the widow interrupted the service by standing and pointing a gnarled finger of accusation and rage in my direction, screeching a "HOW DARE YOU!" as her horrified relatives tried desperately to console her, and the rest of the family noted to themselves to scratch my wife and I off the Christmas card list. But, in the end, nobody said anything, and I'm hoping it was because my noises were interpreted as sobbing, and not laughter. Although my wife insists that it would have been difficult to interpret my fairly clear laughter as anything but. Plus, it would have been strange for me, of all people, to have started to sob uncontrollably at the funeral for such a distant relative, and, to be honest, I'm a little embarrassed to think that anyone would have thought that that song threw me into such an out-of-character emotional frenzy. But hey, beggars can't be choosers.