Why We Sometimes Laugh During Inappropriate Times - WHYY

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Fizza Ali has been one of my closest friends since we met back in high school, in Flushing, Queens, 10 years ago.

I talk to her about pretty much everything, from relationship woes to medical issues and everything in between. She’s a great listener: supportive when she needs to be, but willing to tell me to shut up when I really do need to shut up.

For the most part, Fizza is fantastic with difficult topics.  She’s been there for me when I had some trouble early on in college and when I’ve had family drama or relationship issues.

But there were two specific times, both back when we were in college, when Fizza reacted in a way that kind of freaked me out.

Laughter in the dark times

The first was an ordinary day when we were both off from school and work. We were hanging out at Flushing Meadows Park listening to music and chatting about different things. But I was feeling down on this day because something had happened to my cousin, something that I wanted to share with Fizza.

“And then I don’t know what brought this up, but you told me that your cousin had a miscarriage, and I like broke out in laughter,” Fizza said.

Yeah, she laughed. And she couldn’t stop laughing.

She said that she didn’t think that it was funny, but she just couldn’t stop laughing. “I just, I couldn’t believe myself that I had laughed that hard, but I just kept laughing.”

I remember thinking at first how insensitive she was being by laughing. I was speechless and didn’t know what to say.

But after a few seconds …  the absurdity of it all, just watching her laugh, trying unsuccessfully to control herself … it got to me, and I started laughing as well.

The second bout of inappropriate laughter happened similarly.

Fizza and I were hanging out at my place, eating Chinese food and watching Netflix, when my mom came home early from work looking really bummed out. My mom is a home health aide, and she usually stays with her patients until one of their family members returns home from work.  Normally, she doesn’t get home until nighttime.

“Your mom came home, and you were surprised that she came home early, I think, and she was just like, ‘Yeah, my patient died.’ And I … just started laughing. And she looked at me like I was insane. But I just remember feeling really awkward, and I was like holy shit. And I guess I felt also awkward because, it was your mom. And I don’t know if I’d interacted with her before.”

Fizza was right: That was the first time she and my mother had met, and I was extremely embarrassed about it. I didn’t want my mom to think that all of my friends were these insensitive weirdos.

But as I looked over at my mom watching Fizza, I saw her initial look of shock turn into a smile and then a laugh.  Eventually, all three of us started laughing together.

“I feel like your mom started laughing too, and you did as well, because I think she looked at me like, ‘Wow, this girl is insane,’ and that kind of lightened the situation,” Fizza said.

Those episodes of nervous laughter stuck in my mind for a long time.  They were so memorable, in part, because Fizza didn’t mean to laugh either time. Her laughter was just what came out.

“I feel like it wasn’t under my control at all, you know? And then I couldn’t stop, which made it worse,” she said.

Opposite reactions

Fizza isn’t the only one who experiences unexpected, uncontrolled laughter. Many people react that way when confronted with intense situations.

“We think it …  has to do with regulating your own emotions,” said Margaret Clark, a professor of psychology at Yale University. She’s done some research on nervous laughter and other types of dimorphous expressions of emotion.

Expressions like this happen when we’re feeling really emotional and have an excess of energy inside us. The excess comes out in a way that looks different than what we’re feeling internally.

“You’re overwhelmed, you’re feeling too positive and you express something that’s ordinarily associated with a negative emotion,” Clark explained. “We think it downregulates the intensity of the initial emotion. It works for both positive and negative emotions, because you can be overwhelmed with either kind of emotion and expressing the opposite seems to downregulate the emotion for some people.”