Laugh? I nearly did.
There are plenty of theories about what makes things funny, lots of them stressing the cruel nature of laughter. They suggest it’s an expression of superiority over the person we’re laughing at, but that’s too crude. Laughter’s a shared reaction – and it doesn’t have to be at someone else’s expense. BMK / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) The theory I like best is the one which says that laughter’s actually about thinking. If you like, it’s intellectual, critical. It’s your mind seeing something happening, assuming it’ll pan out in a particular way then having those assumptions undermined when something unexpected happens. At its crudest, it’s the banana skin scenario. e.g. A person (preferably one of rank and substance – a queen, a president, a supermodel, say) is walking along and suddenly becomes a disarticulated mechanism. If the result is a serious injury, the laughter dies at once, which kind of discredits the ‘laughter is cruel’ theory...