Laughter

We had a good time playing cards Friday night. It was a small group that started the evening: Matt, greenman, Kris, and TanMan. Kris played two games and left. The rest of us played two more. I took a first, a second, and two fourths, though I was in strong position to win a second game and if I hadn’t made a stupid bluff, might have placed in another. So I was happy with the evening.

But that’s not why I’m writing. If I just wanted to write about poker, I would post on our poker blog. I want to write about humor. We said some very funny things Friday night. Indeed, I said something around 2:00 am, when there was just the four of us left, that had us all laughing hard. It was that intense kind of laughter that makes you stand up and walk around and bend over and you still are laughing and you can’t stop and you start to ache and tear up but you just can’t stop. And then, after we had all regained composure, TanMan riffed on what I said with something that made us laugh even harder.

But I can’t share it with you. For one thing, it would take way too long to set-up. What I said was based on something Kris had said five hours earlier. It played off of conversations we had in the intervening five hours. I don’t have the time to recreate five hours of conversation and you have neither the time nor the inclination to read them. For another, if you didn’t know the people involved in the joke (people we all know and have acted and worked backstage with) it wouldn’t be funny. It was genuinely funny to us, and not just in a 2:00 am sort of way. But it wouldn’t share very well. At least not in a manner that would be as intense for a reader of this as it was for us.

And ultimately, isn’t that the case with all humor? Isn’t it the case that the more people that can understand the joke, the less intense the resulting humor is? I’ve been to movies where I laughed very, very hard. But it never has approached the intensity of the laughter I experience in a situation with a small group of friends like what happened Friday night.