Christopher Duffy

This is why I love laughter.

It's so fun to be locked in a moment with your friend where you are laughing so hard that you're crying.

That creates these memories that you then think about and talk about for years and become this core of your identity.

Well, I mean, the first and most honest reason is because laughing is really fun.

I mean, this is what I think of as like a good day is if I can laugh really hard.

So that's the first reason why I was really interested in laughter.

And then the second kind of a little bit deeper reason is because I really feel like as I look around at

the world and people that I know and just my own day to day experience, it just felt like there's this real missing piece where things are very serious and heavy and there's not a lot of social value these days placed on lightness and laughter and the connection and joy that can come from having a good sense of humor.

I feel like people kind of either take it for granted or don't think it's very important.

And I think it is so important.

It is it's universal.

It's across cultures.

It's across continents.

And it is it's really fundamentally important.

So there's clearly a reason why we do it.

But it serves a really important purpose in our lives as a way of creating social bonds, as a way of relieving tension and creating group identities, too.

I think that's one of the evolutionary ideas is that that's why we started to laugh and joke is to create in-group identities and to understand who was in and who was out of the group.

That's definitely true.

That's not just your experience.

There's a lot of science that I came across from researchers who study laughter that shows that that is absolutely the case, that laughter occurs much more frequently when we're in social settings.