The Structure of Laughter is Stone Windows
On documenting laughter, a retrospective
Begin by searching for videos of people laughing and listening to them. At first listen at normal speed. Then 1.5x, 2x, 0.5x. Find a new video and start halfway through. Skip ahead. Then try recording your own laugh. Try recording yourself laughing naturally from a course of different laugh-stimulating content. Playback your own laugh at 1.5x speed, 2x speed, 0.5x speed.
So much of my laughter is a restrained exhale pouring out of one nostril as my face creeps up to the tops of my ears. So much of my laughter is in silence as I exist in these peripheral spaces, either too early or too late, not wanting to awaken my lover in whatever state she is in, wanting the best for her, wanting her to rest and wake rested for us to then laugh together unrestrained in ways that both exhale and leave me gasping.
For decades of my life my presence has been known by my laugh. I’ve been echolocated in almost any setting by my guffaw. People have told me my laugh made their events better. I’ve never quite been bullied for my laugh, although it is something worthy of being clowned-upon. Well, that’s a lie. Once, in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, the very first time I visited with my family, we found a raft of sea lions lazing on some fairly smelly assortment of floating docks. This was the perfect opportunity. I’d heard sea lions before. I needed to do a live-comparison, or see if they’d think I was speaking their language. So I laughed as freely as I could. I laugh with an inhale when I’m most satiated. The ‘hah’ noise fundamentally feels like a pushing out, an expulsion, but I’m not sure if I was ever taught I should laugh outwardly instead of inwardly. So, I suck in with my laugh and it resonates in this gasping, grating trumpeting concoction of human noise that always reminded me a bit like a mix between a goose call and sea lion chatter. Somewhere, the video exists. I believe my sister has it. The sea lions bullied me for my laugh. They didn’t respond. Instead they kept on having their conversations. Making noise when another would plop onto the overcrowded dock to complain about the lack of space and then somehow making space in a bit of wood where one could not see any bit of the dock for want of sea lion flesh slapped onto it already. Like those science experiments where one keeps adding smaller and smaller bits to a jar to fill up the space more minutely. Perhaps the sea lion is a non-newtonian subject. Some intelligent grammatical tool built into this writing program wants me to capitalize Newtonian, and I understand that this is a reference to a once real, once living person, and I understand that to give credence there is some prestige delegated to the capitalization, the em-propering of the noun. But this doesn’t feel like a proper setting.
I didn’t always sound like an annoying animal when I laughed. I think it started somewhere in my early pre-teens, but I’m not sure. The first time I remember being noticed by my laugh were the first times where I remember having individuals that would notice me, generally. Which sounds significantly more sad than I intend this. Hindsight is an awkward weapon and growing up I thought I was significantly more alone than I was. I didn’t remember having many distinct friends nor leaving much of an impression on many individuals and yet there are plenty from my grade-school days who remember me fondly. Some of you reading this are those very few. Individuals who I may not have spoken to directly in years. And I am a bit ashamed of that, too. But really the point of this diatribe is to express that it is a miracle that upon reviewing documents like yearbooks or looking back through old memories one can see the hints of other awkward or socially unsure individuals longing for ways to befriend each other. And to be clear, I don’t classify myself as an annoying animal to be reductive or depressive, but rather to state as objectively as I can that author-Cody believes geese and sea lions to be annoying animals.
The movement of laughter is a mysterious wind. Why I likened this to stone windows. Stone, theoretically, shouldn’t let much wind pass through it, and yet tiny cracks can provide life-sustaining air and breath for thousands and millions of creatures deep, deep down in the stone. In the last few years, my laugh has become more tempered in many cases. I laugh softer. Maybe I’m unhappier or suffering more from my depressive episodes than I care to admit, and therefore my laugh is muted. Maybe it’s a critique of my body toward aging, that I should reduce the amount of space my noise takes up. Either way, whereas historically this inward honk of a laugh has been the only noise that proliferates from me during times of mirthfulness, now it is more selective, I suppose, depending on setting. Performance. The movement remains this pulling inward. A personality perhaps. Less a matter of consumption and more a matter of hybridization. I wrote an Ars Poetica poem which speaks toward this idea with the line, ‘Everywhere is I.’ Hopefully someday you’ll get to read it (I tease). If joy is an exhale, then I inhale the breath that carries it to bring it into my being. Of course, this act would make a loud and animalistic noise, carnal blitheness is unspeakable, unknowable.
Once, while I was studying in Davis, I went through the entire 2 Chainz discography multiple times over in the span of a few days because I was obsessed with the creativity of laughter his lyric would compose within me. I thought it was hilarious that I, queer white they from bumfuck New York, was bobbing my head listening to Tity Boi rap on Momma I Hit a Lick,
Baow, baow, straight to the face (Bow)
I'm takin' my lawyer the whole briefcase (Whole)
Makin' a play in the police face
They was like, "Man, he fresh"
I was like, "Go, DJ" (Go)
When they played your new shit
I was like, "No, DJ" (No)
He landed on something with the 6-syllable meter. He landed on something with the 2:1 stressed-to-unstressed syllable count. Triads are intrinsically funny. From American Pie threesome jokes to as far back as father, son, and holy spirit. Or maybe it isn’t comedy, but rather pointing out that imbalance inspires reaction, and reaction can be any mix of comedy, tragedy, romance, and more. So, 2 Chainz had me laughing heartily inside this snobbish coffee shop, Temple Coffee Roasters. It’s great coffee. It definitely caters to a pretentious audience. I’d sit there and listen to people discuss granularity or some count that I have no idea what it pertained to, 27 or 32. I misspelled cater as cator at first, which is, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, the 65782nd most common surname in the U.S. But this coffee shop was one of the locations many of my peers and colleagues would flock so I’d sip a pourover there in order to feel more professionally justified, listening to 2 Chainz over and over again, and laughing with a honk.
I’ll end with these two items:
The first being that sitting down to write my week’s laughs is a profound joy for me. Scouring my memories for the things that brought me joy in any given week is a ten-out-of-ten exercise in mental health improvement, if you’re feeling down. This isn’t to say avoid feelings of sadness, despondency, rage, or to say that one should fixate on trying to be happy as much as one possibly can, but more to say, if you’re looking for ways to be happier, this might be a worthwhile exercise, even if for one week.
The second being that I’m not sure how categorizing and archiving my laughs has affected my laugh-in-the-moment. I don’t really think of experiences in terms of “Oh this is going to be something I’ll be able to write about later.” Sometimes, after a particularly hearty laugh, I give myself a phone note or a jot to stress its importance. I’m not quite ready to say whether I’m laughing more or less, harder or softer, since starting this experiment. To hypothesize, I suspect I am laughing more on any given week. As if the soul looks for a reason to justify glee.
And one addendum: I love rap. I think 2 Chainz is a brilliant lyricist, and I try to acknowledge this alongside the problematizations he has (doesn’t all/most celebrity). When I speak about him in particular and his rap in particular, I don’t speak about it as if to poke fun, but rather out of sheer adoration and impressiveness.
If you also enjoy rap, but perhaps not in a traditional I’m a man and need to listen to big boom to feel powerful like steps quaking the ground as lyrics talk about how rich, cool, and mighty I am I’d love to suggest Doechii and Tierra Whack. Doechii’s latest NISSAN ALTIMA is brilliant, and her rise is so deserved, especially with songs like Swamp Bitches. Tierra Whack has tons of brilliance out there, but perhaps best to start with her latest album, World Wide Whack.
Stay lovely and genius, all.