Inner you
Young children laugh 300 times a day; adults take more than two months to reach that number. But it’s so important to find fun in life, says author Tanith Carey. Here are her tips on how to do it
When was the last time you laughed? Not a carefully timed titter, as part of a polite conversation, but a side-splitting, helpless laughing fit that brought tears to your eyes?
The realisation that I couldn’t recall my last belly laugh hit me a few years ago. As author of the book Feeling ‘Blah’?, which looks at why we don’t feel more joy in the modern world, I started wondering where those big laughs – the kind that make you feel lighter and more alive afterwards – had gone. They had come so much more easily in my childhood and teen years, set off by anything from my best friend drawing a picture of our maths teacher on my exercise book during a lesson, to dressing up my grandma’s dog in a Christmas hat. Yet, years later, those moments only happened once in a blue moon.
It’s not that adults don’t laugh. We do, but it tends to be as a social signal to the people we are talking with that we are paying attention and want to communicate with them.
But when it comes to the big laughs, research has found that we tend to drop off a humour cliff in our early 20s. According to a Gallup survey of 1.4m people, until the age of 23, about eight in 10 people say they smiled or laughed a lot the previous day. After that age, the number starts to drop sharply. By the age of 50, one in three say they didn’t laugh at all.
So, considering we start laughing at around three months old as our first way of interacting with the world, why do the big laughs tend to tail off in adulthood? There are several reasons, according to experts. Along with being more carefree, one reason children laugh more is because they are only just learning the rules of how to behave. So when we are little, it strikes us as extra funny when those rules get broken – or people don’t do the things they are supposed to. My grandmother would recall how, as a young child, I would laugh helplessly at the slapstick humour of Laurel and Hardy, but when I checked the other day, the sight of them slamming doors in each other’s faces no longer even raised a smile.
Another reason is that kids spend lots more time playing – and laughter is a vital form of communication in their games, says Sophie Scott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. ‘For children, laughter is a very strong cue to others to join in. It’s a way of saying: “I have something in common with you. I want to hang out with you.”
As children grow into teens, it becomes even more important to mark out who your social group is.
