Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

So let’s weave our facts and speculations together into the petite vacation hypothesis. In our primate evolution, laughter begins in the open-mouth play faces of chimps and bonobos, which signal and initiate playful routines. The quality of laughter, its sound and function and feeling, is rooted in physical action, as Darwin long ago observed: It is intertwined with exhalation, and the reduction in stress-related physiology. A special realm of sound is reserved for laughs, and it is an ancient one that predates language, represented in old regions of the nervous system—the brain stem—which also regulates breathing. This acoustic space reserved for laughs triggers laughter and pleasure in others, and designates, like the confines of a circus or theater, a social realm for acts of pretense and the imagination. In the pretend play of young children, laughter enables playful routines that allow them to have alternative perspectives on the world they are facing. Laughter is a ticket to the world of pretense, it is a two-to three-second vacation from the encumbrances, burdens, and gravity of the world of literal truths and sincere commitments.

LAUGHING AT DEATH

 

My dear friend and colleague George Bonanno took a while to get to academics. After riding trains, picking apples in Washington State, living in communes, and painting signs in Arizona, he decided, on a whim, to take a community college creative writing course. After his first submission, he was discovered by his instructor, and quickly found himself on a fast track toward a PhD at Yale. Proponents of the conventional view of trauma may have wished that he never took that writing course.

For the past fifteen years, using intensive narrative interviews and longitudinal designs, he has studied how individuals adapt to various kinds of trauma—the death of a marital partner, the 9 /11 attacks, sexual abuse, the death of a child. He kept encountering a basic finding not anticipated in the literature on trauma. The conventional view is that after a trauma everyone suffers prolonged periods of maladjustment, anxiety, distress, and depression. George has found in every study he has conducted that a significant proportion of people suffering a trauma experience distress and upset but, in the broader scheme of things, fare quite well. Within a year, they are as happy as they were, more poignant perhaps, filled with bursts of breathless longing, but in the end, content with life, and perhaps a bit wiser.

His question: What allows people to adjust to life-altering traumas? Our answer: Laughter. Laughter provides a brief vacation from the existential impossibilities, the deep sadness, the disorienting anxieties, of losing a loved one, or losing a city or way of life.

To test this thesis, George and I undertook a study to look at the role of laughter during bereavement. To do so, we brought forty-five adults to our laboratory, individuals who six months prior had watched their spouses die. Six months into bereavement is a poignant time. The death of a spouse leaves individuals mildly depressed, disoriented, lonely, and disorganized. The daily rhythms of a marriage are gone. So too are the conversations about what happened during the day, the fragments of a dream, the funny thing a friend or loved one did or said, how work went. Bereaved adults often have trouble conducting the daily affairs of their lives—remembering to pay bills, plan dinners, go shopping, fix cars—because the other part of their collective mind is gone. Reminders of their partner—photos, clothing, scents and sounds from the past—weigh them down in yearning. So we asked: Would laughter prompt bereaved adults to find new layers of meaning in the midst of trauma, and perhaps a path to the meaningful life?

Our forty-five participants came to George’s lab in San Francisco, really an upstairs room in an old Victorian, with wood floors and paned glass. After some preliminary talk, George asked the participants the simplest of things, to “tell me about your relationship with your deceased partner.” They were then given six minutes to tell their narratives of their relationships with the deceased spouse. There were stories of meeting one another at a blues show, of wild youth, raising children, and then bleeding gums that presaged a rapid death six months later, with children at the mother’s side at the hospital bed. One man, in response to George’s question, could only sob and gasp for six minutes, uttering not a word. I remember another woman whose husband had committed suicide at the end of a manic episode that was capped off by a disturbing visit to his mother. At the end of her narrative of this freefall, one could hear doves cooing on the windowsill of the lab room.