Last Tuesday, something happened that I can't explain to you. Not because it's private. Because it wasn't funny.
It was one of those moments — you know the ones — where something tips over into laughter and the laughter feeds on itself and suddenly you're gone. Past the point of recovery. Past the point where you could explain what's happening to a confused bystander. Past the point of breathing, speaking, or maintaining any form of dignity.
I was with a friend. We were talking about something completely mundane — I think it was bins. The bins were being collected on the wrong day. This was, by any objective standard, one of the least funny situations available to humans. And yet something about the way she said it, or the look on my face when she said it, or the accumulated absurdity of two adults having an intense conversation about bin day, tipped us over the edge.
I laughed until my stomach cramped. Until tears were streaming. Until I was making that silent wheezing sound that looks, to the uninitiated, like a medical emergency. She was worse. She was on her knees. Neither of us could stop. Every time we made eye contact, it started again.
It lasted maybe four minutes. The most pointless, unproductive, unjustifiable four minutes of my week.
And the best. The best by a distance so large it's embarrassing.
When was the last time you laughed like that? Not the polite laugh. Not the social laugh. Not the "lol" you type without any actual laughter occurring anywhere in your body. The real one. The involuntary, whole-body, couldn't-stop-if-you-tried one that leaves you empty and light and vaguely confused about what just happened.
If you have to think about it — if the answer doesn't come immediately — that's worth noticing.
Laughter is the most underrated form of play. It's completely involuntary when it's real. You can't manufacture it. You can't optimise it. You can't schedule it into your calendar between "strategy call" and "inbox zero." It arrives unannounced, triggered by things that don't translate, and disappears just as quickly, leaving behind nothing except a feeling in your stomach and a weird bond with whoever was there.
It's also the most social thing humans do. Real laughter — the helpless, contagious kind — almost never happens alone. It's a group phenomenon. It needs a room, a moment, a shared absurdity that exists between people and wouldn't survive outside that specific context. That's why "you had to be there" is the most common postscript to any good laugh. You did have to be there. The funniness lived in the room, not in the content.
We don't laugh enough. Studies — if you need a study to validate this, which is itself a bit sad but here we are — show that children laugh several hundred times a day. Adults laugh about fifteen times. Fifteen. We went from several hundred to fifteen and nobody staged an intervention.
Some of this is natural — adult life is genuinely less surprising than childhood, and surprise is a big driver of laughter. But some of it is structural. We've built lives that are efficient, controlled, and predictable. We've minimised the space for spontaneity, absurdity, and the kind of unscripted social contact where helpless laughter is most likely to erupt.
We've also gotten weirdly serious about humour itself. Comedy is "content" now. Laughter is a "response" that can be measured. We consume comedy alone, through screens, with the volume low, and we exhale slightly through our nose and call it laughing. It's the nutritional equivalent of eating a picture of food.
The laugh that happened on Tuesday — the bin day laugh — couldn't have been planned, scripted, or reproduced. It required two people, a mundane topic, a specific moment, and the accumulated history of a friendship that has its own private frequency. It was four minutes of pure play. No purpose. No content. No takeaway except the memory of the feeling, which is already fading but which, while it lasted, was the most alive I'd felt all week.
I can't tell you how to laugh more. Laughter resists instruction. But I can tell you this: it's more likely to happen in person. It's more likely to happen with people you're comfortable with. It's more likely to happen when you're not trying to be productive, impressive, or on-brand.
It's more likely to happen in the gaps.
Leave the gaps alone.
Something funny might show up.