This may have been answered here before. I do not know.
Kids laugh on average 146 or 60 (or whatever ) times a day. Adults laugh 4 or 10 (or whatever ) times a day. Why?
I laugh less every day because I have an odd sense of humour and I laugh at many things. If I am at work or with other people I will often encounter someone who gets offended because they think I am laughing at them. Every time this happens, I think I laugh less in the future ( if that makes sense).
Grown ups have heard the jokes already.
Also, jangling the car keys in front of me just doesn’t do it for me anymore.
For my part, I have now grown big enough to give people who tickle me a swift punch to the solar plexus.
Yeah, I think that increased experiences cause situations to be less funny than as a child. Things are funny if they are unexpected and pleasant…age takes the ‘unexpected’ part out of the equation.
This is exactly correct in my opinion. Humor involves an element of suprise and it’s more difficult to suprise an older person.
Speak for yourself.
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Heheheheh.
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I think that loss of laughter is one of the worst things about being an adult. We take ourselves* waaaay* to seriously. Being a clumsy and Comsically Fucked person, I would go insane if I hadn’t trained myself to find humor in life’s mishaps.
This morning, I found that my dog had suffered a bout of terrble diarhea in the night. She must have decided that waking me up to ask to go out would have been impolite, and further, that once an area had been soiled, she shouldn’t compound the mistake by returning to it for the next bout. So, as a result, she shit in every room of the upstairs. Then, remembering that pooping in the house is verbotten, she dragged a pillow over one of the piles. And, of course, I ran out of carpet cleaner half-way through dealing with the mess.
My first reaction was to cry (well, no, actually, my first reaction was to wonder how much of a mess skinning her alive would make.) Then, the absurdity of the situation got to me, and I started laughing. (The image of her tugging the pillow to cover the pile of gooey poo thinking herself mighty clever really set me off.)
What can you do? In life, it’s either laugh or cry. You can get angry when you drop a glass of milk, or you can laugh at the funny sound the glass made when it shattered and the impressive spread of milk on the floor. You can get upset when your car is rear-ended, or you can laugh at the way your car looks with its bumper mashed into what was once the back seat. You can swear and scream when you drop your books or lunch into a mud puddle, or you can laugh at the splatter. It;s my opinion that it’s healthier to laugh, because it relieves the stress.
In my totally non-scientific opinion, it results partially from a general clamp-down on our outward displays of emotion. We cry less, we laugh less, we yell less, etc. Those are all considered pretty dramatic displays of emotion which, as adults, we avoid to keep social interactions calm and stable. The more we can predict the actions of those around us, the more comfortable we are, so we all adhere to a baseline of behavior to keep everyone at ease. (Generally.)
The things that made me giggle as a kid still do, it’s just I don’t outwardly display it nearly as often. Burps are funny, people bring startled or tripping are funny, etc. I just don’t laugh out loud over those things so that I don’t offend or hurt the objects of my amusement.
Income Tax.
I think if anything I laugh MORE now than when I was a kid.
Of course, when I laughed as a kid people didn’t cast uneasy glances back and forth to each other quite so often…
I have been going thru a long spell where laughter was extinct, or so it seemed. But all of a sudden, yesterday for some unknown reason, I found my laughter. I laughed out loud all thru Will & Grace, I have laughed at little things my dogs & cats have done, I laughed at work, watching the dogs play. I even have laughed at some of the goofy crap I have been writing.
I don’t know how long this will last, but it is GOOD to laugh again!
I think that experiences, social situations, and income tax may explain part of it, but not all of it. It may simply be that our brains are hardwired to laugh less than kids.
There is talk of raising the driving age to 20 in the US. While I don’t think it has a chance of coming to be, it is grounded in some pretty good science (which I can’t cite). The human brain is not fully developed until around the age of 20. A 17-year-old cannot fully deal with the unpredictability of the road because her brain is not yet capable of doing so. And through no fault of her own.
Even if you doubt the above, it should be clear that kids simply don’t think in the same ways that adults do. Clearly the average 5-year-old is not going to grasp advanced physics concepts. But he will be far more advanced in his knowledge of the Scary Thing Under the Bed.
With all that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine that kids and adults have a differing approach to humor.
Well said. I think that is why as a child I could tolerate the Three Stooges and other physical comedy but as an adult slapstick just isn’t funny. Occasionally a movie will include a bit of physical humor that will surpise me and make me laugh, but rarely.
Sorry, but the Stooges are always funny.
Regarding the OP question … think of it this way … if everyone, as an adult, continues to laugh and giggle as they did as a child, how socially acceptable is that? Such a person will be viewed as silly or immature. So that’s at least part of it. But as others have pointed out, adults tend to think before reacting instead of just reacting as children do.
I find physical comedy to be as funny as it was before but the kind of physical comedy I find funny is changing. Think about the scene in Indiana Jones where there’s a guy showing off with a sword and Indy just shoots him (I’m not imaginging this, am I?). That’s physical comedy. That’s slapstick. That’s funny. It’s just not goofy or cheesy like the Three Stooges, but rather gruesome and witty.
Yes, and it made me laugh because it surprised me. You expect a drawn-out fight scene. You get Indy rolling his eyes, pulling a gun and shooting. Surprise! And a fun one too. I don’t know that I would equate it with slapstick though. From dictionary.com
Maybe your definition and mine differ though.
I’m not so sure of this.
Just a few minutes ago, I dressed all in black, put on a gorilla mask and hid in my 87-year-old grandma’s closet. When she went to get her coat, I jumped out and shouted “Boo!” as loud as I could.
Boy, was she surprised!
…Grandma?
Grandma?
Oh, shit…
This is not some plug for Howard Stern, but every show he and Arti really crack me up several times at least. I listen to them on head phones so when people see me laughing they really think I’m nuts.
I’m 53 and have never laughed more in my life.
I also still enjoy the Three Stooges, but I don’t see them very often. I watched a couple of episodes on Spike TV a few days ago. Still funny.
Today kids are so blasé they don’t even laugh watching Tom & Jerry. I still do. A lot.