The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [53]
Typical laugh-getters included “I know!”, “Look, it’s Andre!”, “Nice meeting you too,” “What can I say?”, and “How are you?”
If rarely a response to humor, what is laughter for? Provine speculated it expresses “grunts and cackles from our animal unconscious,” hand-me-downs from ancestor apes. Perhaps. We can’t ask them. More useful is the notion that, like so much else in talk, laughter is a grooming device for smoothing and restyling interaction.
➺ Rule one: Laughter is a social organizer
When we “get it,” “it” is not only the joke, but the effervescent intimacy with everyone else laughing. And in those eight out of ten cases where no joke is in sight, laughter serves as social punctuation: Like an exclamation mark, it says “Really good to meet you!” or “Andre? So it is!” On an emotional level, this shows approval: “I’m talking to you and I like it!” On the practical, it denotes a change of topic.
So to laugh after “What can I say?” is a way of saying “Not a lot on that topic! Any other offers?” And at Andre’s arrival, its punctuation opens a gap in conversation, to let Andre in, or let out the person who spies him (noticing being a classic conversation getaway).
Laughter also opens trapdoors in serious moods, and we use it tactically, as a matter of Machiavellian instinct. For instance, most of us laugh after raising troubling topics, a reflex that gives listeners two options: to laugh too, or to react seriously and talk. Hence we’re wise to quip at our blunders. If others laugh, the moment is burst, conversation levitated out of awkwardness, and speakers are returned to an equal footing. No matter if their first impulse was to laugh at you, now it is with you: Your quip gives permission.
This illustrates how laughter not only gives conversation rhythm, but also regulates intimacy, releasing tension, communicating emotion, performing a similar job to those dials you twiddle on stereos, equalizers. Without its pulse, talk feels dead and social syntax buckles, because in very precise ways, laughter synchronizes conversation’s dance. Muff the joke, miss the beat, giggle too late, and you’ll soon feel out of the loop—making humor a status game.
➺ Rule two: Laughter is a status moderator that can lift you up or down
Casanova trod the knife edge in 1750 Paris. New in town, seeking friends, he was chatting to a plump man at the opera when he spied a lady, “covered in jewels but enormous in size”:
“And who,” I asked my fat neighbor, “is that fat pig?”
“The wife of this fat pig.”
“Oh! I beg a thousand pardons.”
Luckily the man, “choking with laughter,” promptly asked him to dinner, a coup later crowned when an aristocrat sneered that an actress admired by the Italian lothario had “terrible legs.” Casanova replied:
I cannot see them, monsieur; and anyway, in judging female beauty, the first thing I set apart are the legs.
The fortuitous pun won him “immediate standing.”
But the easiest way to make people laugh is be their boss. I remember, a lowly assistant and new to a company, making a barbed remark in a meeting. Silence. Then the man next to me repeated it, and everybody needed straitjackets. Maybe they didn’t hear me, maybe they disliked me, maybe my timing was way off. I prefer to think the problem was social position. Until this point I’d communicated in shades of blush, whereas he was resident funnyman—far better qualified than me to be funny.
➺ Rule three: Humor melts barriers
If I’d been more laid back, however, banter might have brought me real influence. On-target laughter is a powerful weapon. Fourteenth-century artist Giotto vaporized social boundaries with backchat, winning the friendship of the King of Naples.
One scalding summer’s day the king said, “I’d stop painting if I were you.”
“I would too,” said Giotto, “if I were you.”
This seems ample proof of George Bernard Shaw’s claim:
To tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh or they’ll kill you.
You can get away with murder if you make people