Laughter
The saying goes that laughter is the best medicine, which is, when you look at it, a funny contradiction in itself. Medicine is by its nature unpleasant. It implies something is wrong, something requiring correction, a deficiency to be addressed or a condition to be managed.
Laughter is none of those things. Laughter is what happens when the corrective machinery briefly stops running and something else breaks through—something unplanned, ungovernable, and entirely without agenda. To call it medicine is to reach for a familiar frame of value, which I understand, but the frame doesn’t quite fit the thing. Laughter doesn’t work the way medicine works. It doesn’t treat. It simply arrives, and while it’s here, other things can’t be.
I want to say something about laughter in the context of the work I did, because it appeared in that context more often than most people would probably expect, and it appeared in ways that told me things I couldn’t have learned otherwise.
A man would come in carrying himself in a particular way—careful, measured, the posture of someone managing an impression—and then something would happen, some small shift in the room, some unexpected moment of contact or absurdity or plain human awkwardness, and he would laugh. Not the social laugh, the one deployed to signal appreciation or ease a transition. The real thing. The kind that comes from the body rather than the performance of the body. And in that moment, I noticed, the careful carrying stopped.
Laughter of that quality—the kind that arises from a genuinely funny juxtaposition of words, or from something essentially ridiculous about the situation two people find themselves in, or from the sheer physical comedy that bodies sometimes produce when they are not being supervised—is not compatible with tension. They cannot coexist. I found that when a man laughed that way, the tissue in his back changed under my hands. The shoulders that had been holding somewhere near his ears would simply drop. The jaw would release. The breath would descend from the high, careful place in the chest where it had been residing and find its way down to where it was supposed to live. The laugh did in a moment what the best part of an hour’s work had been building toward. I am not saying laughter replaced the work. I am saying it sometimes completed it faster than the work alone would have.
I noticed three distinct kinds of laughter in that room, and they each meant different things.
The first was embarrassment. A man at a loss for what to do—unsure of the protocol, unsure of himself, unsure of what the situation required—would sometimes laugh before he’d found any words, and the laugh was a flag: I don’t know the next move. This was not uncomfortable to be with. It was, in fact, one of the more endearing things I regularly encountered. The embarrassment said that the man was present, that he hadn’t retreated behind a persona or a performance, that he was genuinely in the situation without a script and feeling it. That quality of being genuinely present, even if it came with redness of face and an uncertain laugh, was something I valued. It meant the session was beginning in contact rather than in management. Management is easier for the man and less interesting for both of us.
The second kind arose from the work itself—from the simple, irreducible fact that bodies are funny. They make sounds. They respond in unexpected ways. They have a comedy of their own that no amount of solemnity can entirely suppress, and in a room where solemnity wasn’t the point, the comedy surfaced regularly. I noticed that a man who could laugh at his own body—at the involuntary sound it made, or the way it flinched when it hadn’t expected to, or the sheer undignified comedy of being a physical creature subject to all the minor indignities that entails—was a man who had arrived somewhere useful. He had stopped being the manager of his body’s presentation and was simply in it. The laugh was the signal that the gap between the self and the body had briefly closed.
The third kind was what one man described, with what I thought was admirable plainness, as the natural result of having a fun, erotic, sexy, affectionate time spent together. He said it exactly like that. I found it precise enough to carry here, because it captures something the more analytical framings miss: that some of what happened in those sessions was simply enjoyable in the way that good time spent with another person is enjoyable, and that enjoyment produces laughter the way warmth produces ease. There was nothing more complicated required to explain it. Two people were together, the time was good, and they laughed. The clinical vocabulary doesn’t have a category for that. The experience doesn’t need one.
What I came to understand, watching this happen again and again over years, was that the moment of real laughter was one of the more reliable indicators available to me of where a man actually was. Not where he presented himself as being. Not where the careful management suggested he was. Where he actually was. A man can maintain composure under considerable internal pressure—can answer questions evenly, can hold his body in a configuration that reads as relaxed, can produce the social signals of ease while something entirely different runs underneath. Laughter of the involuntary kind breaks that maintenance. It doesn’t ask permission. It simply happens, and while it’s happening everything held in place by effort briefly releases, and what remains is the man himself, undressed in a way that has nothing to do with clothes.
I noticed the corresponding change in the body every time. It was one of the more striking regularities of the work: that real laughter produced a physical ease that was immediately legible to the hands. The release wasn’t subtle. Something let go, usually in the shoulders and the belly and the breath, and the letting go moved outward from those places into the surrounding tissue with a speed that no technique I had produced the same result. I found I stopped trying to distinguish the laughter from the work, eventually. They were the same work. The hands and the humour were doing the same thing from different directions.
There is something I want to say about the particular quality of laughing with someone rather than at them, because the distinction operated everywhere in the work and nowhere more clearly than in these moments. A man whose body makes an unexpected sound is briefly exposed, and what happens next depends entirely on what he reads in the room. If he reads judgement, or even the possibility of judgement, the exposure becomes a wound and the guard goes back up faster than it came down. If he reads something else—amusement that includes him rather than targets him, an acknowledgement that the moment is funny for both people in it—the exposure becomes something different. A shared thing. I found that the laugh, when it landed that way, was followed by a quality of ease that lingered well beyond the moment itself. He had been in an awkward situation and come through it without cost, which is a kind of safety, and safety produces its own particular relaxation.
I think about the phrase letting go, which appears everywhere in discussions of relaxation and is mostly treated as a metaphor. In those moments with a man who had just laughed the real laugh, it did not feel like a metaphor. Something had been released. You could feel it. The body that had been held in readiness, braced against the weight of being a person with responsibilities and a position and an image to maintain, had for a moment put the weight down. Not permanently. Men left and went back to their lives, which went back to their ordinary requirements. But the body remembered, at least briefly, that the putting down was possible. That was not a small thing to leave with.
I said at the outset that calling laughter medicine is a funny contradiction, and I want to end by returning to it, because I think the contradiction is more interesting than the saying. Medicine corrects. It intervenes in a malfunction. It proceeds from the premise that something is wrong. Laughter proceeds from no such premise. It arrives when something is, briefly, right—when two people are present together without the usual management, when a body says something unexpected and the room allows it to be funny, when a man finds himself somewhere he didn’t plan to be and discovers it is better than what he planned. The ease that follows is not the absence of something wrong. It is the presence of something that was always available and is rarely allowed.
If that’s medicine, it is medicine of a very unusual kind. The patient doesn’t take it. The patient becomes, for a moment, the kind of person who doesn’t need it. And watching that happen, watching a man change from the person who walked in to the person who could laugh with pure abandonment and feel the change move through his whole body—I found that this was among the better things I witnessed in the work. And I notice that the best response I have to it, even now, is to find it genuinely, quietly funny. Which perhaps proves the point.
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