Laugh of a lifetime

The social scientists are right, I laugh mainly as a signal to others that I am not going to suddenly reach out and grab them by the throat.

I had never actually realized laughter’s main role. I have known about hand waving for a long time, as not so much a symbol of saying “Hello,” as showing me their hand is empty, no concealed dagger there with which to bring me low. But I thought laughter, or what passes for laughter at cocktail parties, was just a way to fill time between the weather chat and the sports chat. Now I know it is a tool I can use to gain acceptance.

And I appreciate others doing the same for me. Sometimes I wish their laughter didn’t sound so phony, but that’s probably not so much a bare masking of their real intent than it is the simple absence of anything really worth laughing at. I bet I could count on less than both hands the things I have encountered, spontaneously or programmed, in the last year, that were worth laughing at. And Robin Williams was probably involved in half of them.

I don’t laugh much, actually. I take after my late Uncle Clyde, who was not dour in any way, but remained all of his life, at least by appearances, on the serious side of reserved. An older acquaintance of mine, a witty man who was a contemporary of my Uncle Clyde, said the appearance was not the reality, that Clyde inside was a mirthful man, actually, and when he chortled – he had this low, rumbling chortle – it was the same as any other person jumping up and down on the coffee table.

I am like that. I loved the man, looked up to him, and maybe I took after him. He was a cavalry officer, in the last years when cavalrymen actually rode horses, and my first memory of him relates to the saddles and tack stored on our front porch while Clyde was in the South Pacific. When he came back after the war, bigger than life, he took me every Saturday morning to the Dixie Pig for pancakes, and I imagine at the table I tried to sit like him and look like him. I would like to have a picture of that.

I hope he had one really good, helpless, laugh in his life. I hope that for everybody. There’s a downside; all laughter after a helpless laugh is compared to it, like the second hole-in-one is just not the same. A good laugh is very much of a unique moment, not anticipated, not possible to anticipate. Surprise must be part of the magic. Who could have known how funny Michael Palin would be, as the “Woman” scene started, in “Life of Brian.” My son was there, and he will tell you he had never seen me that way before. We have watched that scene again, and laughed again, but it was not the same.

I was alone when I had the helpless laugh. I was sitting in the living room, tossing a tennis ball for Barkeley, a most personable Sheltie, to fetch. I threw it from a chair by the television, across the living room so it bounced through a wide entry into the kitchen, and then through a doorway into the hall. Barkeley would disappear into the dark hallway and then emerge again, prancing with the ball.

But then I threw it and missed the hallway door to the left. The ball bounced in the corner between the kitchen wall and the hallway doorjamb. Barkeley slammed on the brakes, dropped her tail down, set her feet wide, but couldn’t stop on the kitchen’s hardwood floor. Her eyes never left the ball as she slid past it, ears up and tail down, at a decent velocity through the hallway door and into the darkness.

It was as if someone had yanked a plug on my ability to control myself in any way. In my brain was a pure circuit, put there to be used just once, to sustain the body chaos of the next several minutes, and my ability to survive it. I was meant to miss the doorway just once, Barkeley was born to come into my life and slide at speed through the hallway door into the darkness just once, that circuit was placed to accommodate the result, just once, and now it is spent, vestigial, its purpose realized, to keep me alive through the one time I could have died laughing.