In Slate’s elegy for the humorist, Dave Barry, I found this quote:
"I read it and realized it was the first time in my life I had laughed out loud while reading the printed word," says Weingarten…
We are a nation of silent laughers. Laughing is best kept to oneself.
I once received this email compliment from my boss’s boss after one of my lighter memos: “I have to confess, you made me laugh out loud.”
Things were never the same between us. To this day, I’m looking over my shoulder at work. I had gone beyond amusing him. I made him do something to which he had to confess.
I’ve read similar confessions on the back of books:
XXX made me laugh out loud.
Every page had me laughing out loud.
I’ll admit it, when I read XXX’s book, I was laughing out loud.
You may read that as praise. I see people trying to come clean. It’s a dangerous business. It’s not hard to see how Clinton haters might have successfully driven him from office if he had slipped up with a little honesty: “I did not have sex with that woman. But she did make me laugh out loud.”
Laughing, apparently, is an activity we’d rather conduct internally. I don’t know if this is a human or specifically American trait, but it goes a long way toward explaining the contorted, pain-filled faces we make during those fleeting moments of the most extreme intimacy. We wouldn’t want anyone to think we were having a good time.
There's an Orwell comment in an essay someplace doubting the character of a person who never laughs when alone. Anyone remember where? I can't place it.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at January 13, 2005 07:37 PM