It feels good to laugh but laughter is contagious and addictive. Humor should be treated like a controlled substance. After all, it is the leading cause of laughter - real laughter. I'm talking about spontaneous, involuntary spasms of genuine mirth. Artificially induced chortling needn't apply.
Laughter is caused by the sudden and favorable resolution of an anxiety. Humor is art's ugly sister whom we exhort instead of exalt, but some art - like Yue Minjun's toothy self-portraits or even ancient hieroglyphics of people with cat or bird heads - can make me laugh. Music is more apt to make me cry.
Laughter is an effect, not a cause. It is a reaction to, and a symptom of humor. We yawn, we sneeze, we laugh. Laughing is a physical paroxysm that is good for the heart due to stress relief. So the chucklish endorphin-rush is indeed a tonic to many mental and physical maladies but the quality of humor that uncorks it varies as widely as Bordeaux to Boone's Farm, or in artspeak - da Vinci to Dilbert.
Some people laugh only to signal their superiority in a social pecking order. I just let these connivers twist in their own wind. Others laugh to convince themselves that they are having fun. This too is fake laughter and, like canned laughter, leaves a bad taste in my ears. Genuine laughter has a trenchant musical quality like Aristophane's Frogs versus, say, Kermit.
Humor is where it finds you. Be happy when it does, but don't try to summons it at will...
...(Read the rest of this essay in The Intellectual Handyman On Art, a new book by Gary R. Peterson from iUniverse.)
