LOL!

What makes you laugh?

Wit is the key, I think, to anybody’s heart, because who doesn’t like to laugh

Julia Robert’s

Laughter is the best medicine:

Why did the doctor tell the nurses to be quiet when walking past the medicine cabinet? 

So they wouldn’t wake the sleeping pills.

I remember enjoying reading the jokes in the Reader’s Digest, (remember laughter is the best medicine?) and then there were those other series, where the jokes were placed after some serious emotional drama story. I used to look for a ‘laughter is the best medicine’ kind of joke everywhere. They were nice, clean, and genuinely funny. At no point were any of these making a mockery of another person, or their handicap or something slap-stick. And then came the, Tom&Jerry and Laurel-Hardy. These never seemed slapstick, they were always humungously hilarious and got us smiling with their histrionics. It wasn’t until I started my course on film criticism, that I paid much attention to Charlie Chaplin or the chaos he lived through while filming. This is when I realized that Tom&Jerry or Laurel Hardy were just making a fool of themselves to make us feel a bit better about the average life and average expectations we accepted for ourselves.

Laughter is my defence mechanism. If I find something funny, I laugh, and if I find something difficult or upsetting or something I cannot accept, I laugh. It led to quite a few awkward situations, like when I got the results of the CAT exams, for which I had not prepared. Or that time a relative forced me to laugh in front of company, to show that I had a funny laugh or that I could do many kinds of laughs. Or that time when I bumped the inside of my elbow in passing and winced, only to be told, “OH! You hit the funny bone! That must be painful!” Why is it called the funny bone? Especially when a mere tap causes you to wince in agony. But, it is what it is. Funny Bone not so funny. Slapstick humor makes you wince at the trauma of being a witness. And yet, I laugh because that’s how I cope with the horror of it all!

So what makes me laugh? Like belly-ache-inducing laugh, that kills you with every breath, but still forces you to laugh just a little more?

A good joke. One that’s not making fun of a person or their situation in life. Unless that situation is my sibling tripping and falling on her face, or the kids tumbling on their bums when they were starting to walk, or the pups lolling around the room like tiny worms, with their bellies so full their legs could barely support them. And kids gurgling in laughter. You know, when kids hit the 4-month mark, they can focus and react. Sometimes a loud noise startles them either into tears or into peals of laughter that makes you laugh.

For us, the kid used to laugh when I dropped the rattle on the floor. The loud noise and my equally loud wincing, got the kid to quake in laughter and it was one of the better landmark events I’ve witnessed. I don’t know if it was because they were frightened about the noise, or if it was just funny. But, it always got me going. This only lasted a couple of weeks.

The other thing that always got me to laugh, is my current predicament- whatever that may be at that point in my life. I laugh because I cannot believe that I landed in the situation in the first place. In my head, I am the ‘funny girl’ sometimes I’m super hilarious in a funny kind of way, and sometimes, I am hilarious in a self-deprecating kind of way. I’ve often been told that the latter is not hilarious, but I can’t seem to stop it as it is the façade I hide behind. If I laugh first, there is nothing you can say or do that will hurt me, kinds. Like the time I failed my road test and started to laugh because my trainer could not believe the reason for the ‘Fail’. Or the time we watched our brand new Nokia Express Music handset getting washed with a couple of steel bowls in our washing machine. Or the time the awkward giggle burst out of me when the horn on my good-old-nandu (my first car- Yes, I named her Nandu, cos I did not want my kid to be named Nandini or nandu, whenever I had the kid and if it were a girl!) got stuck when I was driving through an inside road, in town, and a random auto-driver helped me with it while commenting on clueless women drivers. My only defence here is, ‘Nandu never did this while at the service station, all this drama only happened when I drove’ (Maybe, she did not like her name!) But hey! There’s a better way to communicate, and unfortunately, she did not figure it out, cos six months later, I sold her. I laugh at myself a lot. Remember that time I divided the bumper of my brand new Aveo right in the middle with a kiss from the electric transformer outside Mum’s house? That was in the first three days after collecting the car.  

Then of course, there is the real-life comedy, you know, where you trip, or drool or actually have the slip between the cup and lip and I catch it. The closer you are, the louder my laugh. I know. Horrid. Horrid. Me. But, I honestly cannot hold it in, if I witness it. I’ve had my fair share of Cup-Slip-Lip situations and I laugh just as loud there as well. The big eyes, when you know you’ve goofed up, then the quick look around to see who saw it, then the heavy sigh of relief that no one did, then my raucous laughter, because I did. I. Love. This. The. Most. All those expressions in quick succession is super funny.     

I like watching slapstick comedies. Hot Shots, Flubber, Baby’s Day Out, Home Alone series, Mary Poppins or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang are hilarious for the kind of things that happen. You know it’s exaggerated and therefore it’s funny. And you can watch these with the kids. And then there are genuine gems, like ‘Andaz Apna Apna’ which is funny even for adults, it’s a simple script, based on timing and lets you crack up, or “The God’s must be crazy” which makes you wonder what the director was instructing the actor and how many takes it took, or Mr Bean and this series always makes me wonder how the scriptwriters got any work completed, and then there is Ace Ventura, or The Mask, funny to some extent. Or there is of course, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson- I can’t get enough of this series, what started as a subscribed reading from the NY Times back in the day, I eventually saved up enough to buy the series (not the collector’s edition) and continue to read them. Laughter is what gets me through the grieving process as well. The time when mum held up traffic while riding to work, or the time that dad helped me roll my string to tie my pet elephant to the wall, or the time Butch welcomed guests by levitating in excitement at the gate or the time Tara went and placed her head on a guests lap too close to their jewels to get a cuddle and their panic at their predicament. Incidentally, that guest’s jewels are just fine they don’t like dogs at all and they did not find that situation hilarious. But it is these fond memories I reminisce about with my siblings. Each recollection draws out multiple sentiments shared across numerous messages, creating an avalanche of emotions that bind us that much tighter. Bringing us that much closer. Because there is nothing more hilarious than LOL.