Mistakes, Laughter and the Trickster

There are a lot of reasons I’m ashamed to mention that I majored in sociology, the most innocuous of which is that like someone on the more functional end of the autism spectrum I find people’s behavior inexplicable and fascinating. It’s not bad as reasons go, but there’s also a lot of underwater fauna one could say the same thing about. I’m telling ya, I coulda been a marine biologist!

One cool thing about studying sociology, though, was coming across ethnomethodology, the study of how people go about creating the world by how they make sense of it. Wikipedia has a densely-packed but handy quote:

“For the ethnomethodologist, participants produce the order of social settings through their shared sense making practices. Thus, there is an essential natural reflexivity between the activity of making sense of a social setting and the ongoing production of that setting. . . Furthermore, these practices (or methods) are witnessably enacted, making them available for study.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnomethodology#Example

The main reason I’m bringing up ethnomethodology is to introduce the idea of frame breaks and mistakes as a reason for laughter, but I want to point out a couple of things about ethnomethodology as a theoretical approach to understanding people.

First of all, the idea that (social) reality is fundamentally co-created between participants in that reality. I can’t help making a parallel to the notion of co-creation of paranormal phenomena that Greg Bishop of Radio Misterioso often mentions. If people are already predisposed to create reality through shared sense-making practices, so what if one of the partners in sense-making activities is a non-human intelligence?

Second of all, what people do to make sense of their world and enforce the sense they have of their world on others is easily observed. They are often quite happy to tell you the reasons that reality must be this way. This kind of interaction- and context-rich data makes for engaging case studies and can uncover some surprising rules governing the most basic aspects of our behavior. For instance, laughter.

The other day I tripped and stumbled while walking in the front door of my house. I caught myself in time and then burst into laughter. It really was terribly funny! I had tripped, and almost fallen – what could be funnier than that? I was still shaking with genuine laughter as I realized that in fact it had been a rather unremarkable trip with nothing comedic about it. Okay, I reasoned, so there was nothing in fact funny going on here; I laughed because laughter is something that relieves the anxiety produced by having made a mistake. If that were the case, though, why did I still laugh even though I was by myself and didn’t have to worry about saving face in front of anyone else? And why did I genuinely feel like the near-fall had been comedic? Was that feeling just the result of having reflexively laughed in the first place (attribution theory)? Could I ever trust laughter ever again?

It’s kind of a truism that laughter is what we do after someone makes a mistake in order to recover our sense of order. People are supposed to walk upright; falling down is a mistake. It’s a glitch in the matrix that rips us away from our shared sense-making fantasies and shoves our face into quite a different level of reality. Laughter helps heal that breach.

(For me, the funniest mistakes are mistakes with words. Any misuse or repurposing of words, the more unintended the better, makes me howl and sob with laughter. If that was my only way of dealing with anxiety, it would feel great!)

There’s also another occasion laughter regularly arises, which is when frame breaks occur. A frame is a set of expectations about social interaction. Frames are co-created by participants. By way of example, one day I was training with a fellow aikidoka. We ramped up from friendly, handshake type training to grim intensity level where we worked out with complete silence and concentration, doing our best to test one another. At a certain point we both seemed to wake up suddenly and started laughing. No mistake had been made, but the serious frame we had gotten into seemed now as absurd as it had just been so wonderful. Laughter was the spontaneous way out, and it was heartfelt as the result of a good exchange.

Maybe the trickster is the flip side of a mistake. If mistakes and frame breaks can cause not just laughter but actual gut feelings of comedy happen in people, then the Trickster is the god who makes those mistakes and frame breaks happen; laughter personified and activated, like some kind of supernatural yeast or charcoal. The rim shot, the bada-bing to synchronicity’s sweetly sawing string section. If laughter is a frame-jumping mechanism that transfers you from one meaning to another for the same situation, why shouldn’t it be a prime mover when it comes to how humans experience the paranormal?

That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. I know at least one person who really felt the trickster messed her up and was not nice at all. I’m a lot like her, except that for some reason I still think the whole thing is very funny. However, the real impetus behind this post is this: most of the really significant dreams I have always included at least one joke element. On rare occasions I recognize it in the dream, but usually it’s not apparent to me until after I wake up, have made an effort to remember the dream and then start thinking about its meaning. I might try to post an example.