There’s an eerie similarity between the analogy of chicken and egg with that of a joke and laughter. As is often believed, laughter is result of a joke or laughter is reaction to a joke but it’s not always the case.
A joke is basically a construct of order and chaos, we either go from and orderly situation to something bizzare, like with man walks into a bar joke, where everything is in order untill it isn’t or to complete and utter chaos making sense in the end like it happens with elephant and fridge jokes, the premise is chaos to start with, but it makes sense in the end.
Laughter in a joke arises when we cross the barrier between order and chaos. A joke won’t be funny if the barrier is either too big to cross or too small to cross, we won’t get the burst of laughter untill we are excited to cross that barrier.
A typical joke though wouldn’t work unless there is jester and an audience. How is it then, that we are still able to laugh on our own accord if we find a situation or a place or a sign board or an expression on someone else’s face funny? When someone asks you why were you laughing, we mostly say ‘ because I found it funny’, you know there’s a joke in there but you can’t put it into words. We can laugh even if there is no joke explicitly laid out for us. Situations like these suggest that the instant laughter we get, is in turn what leads us to dicovering the underlying joke. It is really very challenging to tell wether laughter comes before the joke or after, hence the chicken and egg analogy.
Let’s take the laughter and joke concept and apply it to daily life, we as individuals are capable of seeing a joke where there is isn’t one (atleast not explicitly) in our daily lives. We call it irony, we are fully capable of seeing it in action if we really look for it everywhere but even more so when it is clearly put in front of our eyes in situations when we are crossing the line between order and chaos. It is irony if a predictable situation turns into something unpredictable or vise versa. This very essence of irony is what lies at the core of jokes and laughter in our daily lives.
If we were to use jokes not only to induce laughter in others but as a means to come to terms with the realities of life, what if we joke about the terrible things in life, missing an important train is chaos, everthing after that is unpredictable, what if we joke about it, rather than worry about how we missed it. We would be able to cross from the waves of unpredictability to the shore of certainty by merely laughing about it, ofcourse carelessly joking everytime won’t get us too far either but why not laugh when you can afford to.
Joke about anything and everything you can when you can. Laugh at all the irony in this world, it won’t solve anything but it will atleast give you the boost required to solve it. If we can’t make it better we can atleast joke about it.
Just saying 