Laughing at Home

 

Tomorrow is my birthday. Naturally, this has me thinking more deeply about my long-standing humor experiment, which began fifteen years ago, in April 2011.

For those who do not know me, are not familiar with Happy Thoughts Travel Fast, or have never encountered my philosophy of humor experiment, this post may shed some light on it.

Shedding a little more light into the world was pretty much the main motivating force behind the experiment, which of course started at home. Long before I treated humor as a formal philosophical inquiry, I loved its healing force, its therapeutic intelligence, and its capacity to give the body relief before the mind has organized a full explanation, complete with backstory, context, and supporting exhibits.

I love the sudden opening that happens when laughter interrupts heaviness and returns a person to breath, proportion, and the ability to get on with life a little lighter in the heart, mind, and soul. I love the sheer pleasure of being lighter in myself.

That love became the foundation of the experiment. Love for the kind of wisdom that helps us know when someone needs a laugh instead of a hard time. Love for humor and laughter because, at the end of the day, we all laugh in the same language. Love for the smiles I see on people’s faces when we laugh about life instead of cry.

The project behind Happy Thoughts Travel Fast began with love. It began at home. In my career and in life, I have seen many good people fall into themselves and then deeper into depression. These same people often mask brilliantly, but when you are paying attention, you can still see sadness just below the surface. Most of us can recognize the difference between a polite smile and a real one. We simply live in a society where it is rarely polite, appropriate, or convenient to discuss what people are actually carrying.

HTTF was my way of creating a little space away from my professional work for all the people I might be able to reach with a laugh at a distance. Over the years, I posted thousands of articles, comics, drawings, jokes, and random pieces of thought from my world. Some were creative and playful. Some were totally incoherent. I almost never edited because my time was limited and, clearly, I live on the don’t-worry-about-it side of the spectrum when it comes to punctuation, grammar, and all things literary.

At the end of the day, I always come back to laughing. I come home to laughing. And I try to welcome others with a little levity and a laugh. I do this because I genuinely enjoy life and wish to spread good cheer. It is a renewable resource, you know.

Anyhow, as a philosopher, I also wanted more than an external account of laughter. I wanted to enter the joke as a field of experience. That makes sense with my background. I have spent much of my life working in the field to deliver critical infrastructure across the globe. It checks that I would approach humor the way I approach most things: as an active systems architect. At least in my mind.

I wanted to know what humor does to perception when the self becomes part of the inquiry. That is not so different from philosophers and scientists postulating on the nature of infinity from inside a finite bioenergetic mechanism, also known as the body. I wanted to test how laughter changes the way a person thinks, teaches, remembers, responds, and is recognized by others. I wanted to bring humor into ordinary life and see whether wisdom could prevail while one was still able to laugh in public.

In 2011, I legally changed my name so that this same wisdom, laughter, and goodwill could become a single public entity. I won’t lie. At first, this was hard for some people who only knew me through my work. My real friends knew I was never as serious as my resume might otherwise imply. Some colleagues could barely bring themselves to say the word Laughing aloud, much less address me as Dr. Sophy Laughing. Soph Laugh, to my friends.

So what did I do?

I told more jokes.

I said I had missed my calling as an anesthesiologist. Imagine going in for surgery. The doctor walks into the room and introduces herself as Dr. Laughing. With a name like that, you know she is there to make you feel better.

That little quip usually brings a laugh, and that is good because that is what all of this has been about.

Still, I am like most everyone else. I have good days and bad ones. Even when my name reminds me to laugh, I do not always laugh.

In late 2017, I had a second serious spinal cord injury. This time, a young girl crashed into me at an ice skating rink. Being a parent, I swerved and landed very badly. I broke an insane number of bones in that fall, but I still skated off the ice. I knew I was hurt. I could not hear anyone, and I was in massive pain, but I still managed to fake my way through dinner.

The next morning, we took me to the emergency room. I knew I was badly hurt, but the doctors and medical professionals we encountered treated it as though it could not possibly be that serious. That is a story in itself. Fast forward: the good doctors at Stanford University finally realized my neck was broken after eighteen months of emergency visits, five insurance plans, and a lot of humble pleading for help.

Not the funniest of situations.

Since we were not getting anywhere here in the States, and since I work internationally, we were finally able to find a brilliant surgeon and five-person surgical team in Cancún. They routinely operate on spinal cord injuries because of all the surfing injuries there. Anyhow, they saved my life. I am forever indebted to them, to my family for taking care of me, to the friends who helped us find this team, and to Mexico.

Then the pandemic hit. It felt like one thing after the other and in the middle of that I kept thinking, life is supposed to be fun. Not because life owes us anything, but becuase we owe our selves the best our minds can envision, even if it's slightly askew from how serious-minded folk see the world. It doens't cost anything to improve your attitude. I upped mine, as I say. Now, up yours! haha (j/k)

There is a deep undercurrent of reverence and respect for life in my humor. I do not do this for the applause. I do not enjoy adulation or being famous. I would rather shine the spotlight on others. For all these reasons, I do not make jokes at the expense of others. I acknowledge that there are a lot of folks out there who like sarcasm and digging into the nitty gritty or low-brow weeds for that raw, biting humor. Some of that stuff cracks me up, but immediately thereafter I feel badly. A lot of people do, but they still laugh; if only not to be singled out as not laughing. 

I prefer to laugh with people while we laugh at life. I would rather give a sentiment, a force of nature, or a strange little emotional weather pattern a name and a funny backstory than share a cultural, ageist, or otherwise insensitive quip at someone else’s expense. People laugh at all kinds of things. That does not automatically make the thing funny.

So, long story short, it has been a hot minute since I have been actively blogging. But I am happy to return. I think I have had enough time inside this experiment to do it justice, both as a philosopher and as a practitioner.

Knowing how to laugh, losing the desire to laugh, and then returning to humor again reminds me that this experiment was never whimsical or fleeting. It reminds me, and maybe my lowering the veil will remind others, that you can lose your laugh and still get it back. No fanfare. No special recipe. No dramatic announcement. Although, full disclosure, I am thinking about offering a masterclass on the mechanics and philosophy of humor for those who are interested in learning how to lighten up and how to help others do the same.

I cannot tell you how many meetings I have been in where the energy started to lean a little sideways. A well-timed bit of levity or a small joke can shift the whole room and minimize disputes before they harden into something heavier. Humor is not a foolproof solution for solving complex interpersonal challenges, but it sure does move the needle toward a lighter space where people can solve those challenges together.

As it turns out, laughing is not only at home, in a name, in a blog, or on stage. It is in life. And speaking from fifteen years of experience, laughing is a pretty good way to go about it.