Laughter, whats that?

The other day, I caught myself scrolling through my camera roll, looking at old videos and pictures to simply pass the time. Out of nowhere, I stumbled across a video from my 8th-grade DC trip where my friends and I were exploring one of the museums. Suddenly, I burst into laughter. Not because anything shocking happened, as I've seen the video before, heck, I took the video, but because somehow my brain still doesn't expect things to go the way they do.

That's when I realized almost everything that has made me laugh has the same main ingredient: the unexpected. The funniest moments in my life are never the planned ones, but they're the ones completely unhinged and off-script. It's the "this was NOT supposed to happen" moments that always get me.

For example, the other day I was playing Fortnite. I was in a normal box fight, something I have done hundreds, if not thousands of times. I was in the perfect position, ready to blast my friend in our battle, but instead, I fat-fingered, switched to my heal splash, and accidentally threw that at him. I literally donated the guy I was fighting 20 free health like a charity worker. My friends were dying laughing, and so was I. It was so stupid and unexpected that it was honestly impossible not to laugh.

Now, if I had to give a scientific explanation (or pretend I could), I would say humor runs on the fuel of unpredictability. Our brains tend to love patterns, so when something breaks the said pattern, like someone pronouncing a word so absurdly wrong during a debate (yes, that may have been me), our brain instantly hits that laugh button.

So what makes me laugh?

Simple: the moments where life glitches and makes you think, "No way that really happened," ... yet it did.




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