Ha Ha!

Once, in college, I had a terrible crush on a girl who was in my math class. She had a frustrated, flustered, intense way about her when she was presenting a proof at the board that sent me into giggle fits if I didn't control myself. One day, I just didn't care, so I giggled all the way through her presentation. Pretty rude. She finally turned to me and asked, "Why are you laughing?" I thought about it and realized I didn't know why. Part of it was because I am immature and wanted to show her affection through teasing her. You know, the sort of thing most of you stopped doing in fifth grade. But that didn't seem to me to account for all of it.

It wasn't until recently, reading from Bishop Segrist's Theology of Wonder, that I began to get more of a handle on this aspect of my character.

Now I suppose folly, like humor, has at least two components: exuberance and incongruity, and both of these resonate to the heart of religious experience, do they not? Exuberance is the experience of things as ever new and ever renewed in God's ever-beginning Creation. The world is always amazing and fresh to the religious heart, the heart of the fool certainly, which knows that every day is the first day of Creation.

Beyond this there is incongruity, which can be the source of that bitter humor which points up the terrible and yet terribly funny, gap between what is and what ought to be; it is 'laughter through tears,' or instead of tears. So Freud regarded humor to be essentially a transformation of hostility.


The mention of incongruity resonated with me, because it made me realize that my laughing so much is a way to deal with the frustration I feel when love isn't meeting my expectations. That is why I laughed at the girl I had a crush on: as a way to relieve the tension in my heart. My soul thinks it must either laugh at the absurdity of a difficult love life or despair over feeling so alone.

As far as exuberance goes: As I was watching that funny girl at the board, I was getting a deeper glimpse into her character. I began to see every one of her little arm movements, her blushing, her frustrated foot tapping, as windows into her funny way of just being herself. I think I had a hard time controlling my laughter because I enjoyed seeing so intimately into someone's character. I don't know if this is quite what Bishop Segrist is talking about when he mentions the 'experience of things as ever new and ever renewed in God's ever-beginning creation', but it seems like a tiny flash of that kind of seeing.