The HaHa Moment

When I started using improv comedy as a brainstorming tool, I had a hunch: that behind every laugh there’s an insight. It turned out to be true. A six-minute comedy game can spark off two hours of idea generation before people start frowning and sighing, which is the cue for the next game.

I wanted to know exactly why a laugh signals an insight, and often masks it as well. And it turned out that the reason why a laugh signals an insight is precisely the same reason why it also masks the insight: because laughter comes from having a scary truth made safe.

Physiologically, a laugh is exactly halfway between a scream of alarm and a sigh of relief. The harder we laugh, the more scary the thing is, and the more relief we’re expressing.

When a mum plays peek-a-boo with her baby, she’s alternately scaring and reassuring it. “Aaargh! Mum’s disappeared! Aah, there she is.” Dads play a similar game, although it tends to be a bit more physical – they throw the poor creature up into the air and (usually) catch it again. It’s a bit more scary than peek-a-boo, and being caught safely is slightly more reassuring, so the baby laughs harder.

When we get a bit older, we stop laughing at the release of physical fears and start laughing at the release of emotional fears. If we’re standing at the edge of a cliff and then we take a step back, it's not suddenly hilarious; but when a comedian reminds us that the things we thought were uniquely bad about us are actually shared by everyone else, then we laugh hard.

It’s no coincidence that the court jester – the fool - was the only one in the medieval court who could tell the truth without getting his head chopped off, because comedy makes the truth safe. There’s nothing funnier than the truth, so truth is always a good subject for comedy. Meanwhile, there’s no point in being unnecessarily traumatised by the truth, if you can laugh at it instead.

It’s a shame, then, that modern parents tell their kids to stop being foolish, and to stop acting like a fool. Being laughed at is one of the most traumatic things that can happen to an educated adult, which is absurd, because when you make people laugh you’re releasing their emotional fears, and this is a very cool and groovy thing to do. And yet we associate being laughed at with social death, with the loss of our social identity. We even have a phrase for it: “I died a death.”

Babies don’t equate laughter with death. We have to be taught to do that.

This idea of the fool fascinates me because the first card in the Tarot deck is The Fool. He’s not like the village idiot, though; there’s nothing stupid about this Fool.

The Fool is the only one of the major cards which has no number. Its qualities live outside and apart from those of the other cards, and it operates through them. It often reverses the meanings or interpretations of other cards, which is what comedians do, too. The same role is performed by the Joker in a pack of playing cards. And because this quality is the same as lila, the Sanskrit concept of divine play, it changes the rules. It shakes up your snow globe.

Life is a shadow of what happens in the mind, and the mind is the stubborn, brutish obstacle between reality and what we see. This obstacle is symbolised by the Fool, which is a humbling thought, but probably fair. And a well-shaped, well-timed funny line has the power to strip away the external structure of something and show us its inner nature instead, by silencing our own Fool, and giving us the guidance of a higher Fool.

When a joke disrupts our surface perceptions, we’re letting in a brief glimpse of the world from another Fool’s point of view. A new angle. The more angles we have, the more accurately our intuition can triangulate the truth of a situation.

It’s a tiny spurt of personal evolution, and we often ignore it, because fun and laughter are just... well, silly, aren’t they? As Churchill said, “Man will occasionally stumble across the truth, but most times he’ll pick himself up and carry on.”

Inner truth is often uncomfortable, and so we protect ourselves by veiling it. This is what masks do; by concealing the outer reality of the actor’s face and replacing it with something more elemental, it not only obliges a deeper response but also permits it. The actor’s personal Fool is temporarily dissolved, and an archetypal Fool takes its place. And because the archetypal Fool takes the responsibility away from the performer, the performer can really let go and let the mask take over.

When we witness this, we laugh our heads off, because we’re seeing universal behaviour performed by the archetypal Fool, through the actor. By playing through the actor, the archetypal Fool is made specific, personal and alive. Its behaviour is dangerous – emotionally dangerous – and it scares us because it holds up a mirror to us. At the same time it’s safe, very safe, because it’s Saturday morning and we’re in a rehearsal studio in London and we’re just... playing.

This is why laughter is so important. It dissolves the limitations of our own personal Fool – our own way of seeing the world – and lets us see just a small bit of what lies beyond. When you make someone laugh, you expand their perceptions, and relieve some of their fears. They don’t even know you’re doing this; it goes under the radar.

You can even tell what aspects of itself a culture is scared of, collectively, by looking at what they laugh at. In England, we’re terrified of losing our social status or getting the unspoken rules of social etiquette wrong, so a lot of our comedy is about people’s status in jeopardy. In France, they laugh at silent mimes – perhaps they’re scared of not being able to talk. Actually, to be fair to them, I think it’s more than that: most mimes’ performances involve extremes of human experience, often finding the laws of physics to be at odds with the laws of human nature. Maybe their laughter is a way of accepting that we don’t live in a predictable, controllable, Cartesian world after all.

Next time you laugh at something, consider what it taught you. Don’t do this whilst you’re laughing, obviously – you don’t want to pull the horse back while it's jumping. Think about it afterwards, because you’ll always find something useful, and you’ll always be ready for it. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have laughed.