Laugh Lurker

     This evening, while I was in my residence hall office, one of the RAs showed some residents a video of a Louisville basketball player breaking his leg. This RA happens to be a nursing major, and his professor showed him this video (linked above) in class today.

     Most of the residents watching this video cringed physically and/or verbally or were shocked into silence. One would think the scene of a man breaking his bone out of his leg should elicit such reactions. One resident, however, gave a totally unexpected reaction. She laughed.

     In response to the residents’ reactions, the RA explained that when he saw this video in class today, he thought the player’s leg had made a perfect square shape when it broke. He thought the thigh was the right side of the square, the shin was the top part of the square, and the broken part of the leg made the left side of the square, all with perfect 90-degree angles. The girl just laughed more.

     I commented that it was strange for her to laugh at such a traumatic event, and she responded that she laughs when she gets nervous or doesn’t know what else to do in situations.

     She then told a story about the first time she gave blood. The nurse who was drawing her blood told her that if she didn’t start laughing and loosen up a bit, the nurse was going to have to stick her arm again. “So I just started laughing!,” she said, and imitated an extremely nervous, spastic laugh.

     The RA looked incredulous. His only response to this girl was: “That sounds legit.” Everyone in the room then laughed.

     Although this seems like an awkward situation to record as my laugh lurker assignment, I found it very interesting. I got to observe and analyze two types of laughter this evening: nervous laughter and real laughter.

     Obviously the girl that was laughing at the video was laughing nervously. She had no idea how to react to the situation other than to laugh. It was easier for her to laugh at a man breaking his leg than to cry or cringe. This man’s own teammates couldn’t even look at him after his leg broke, so how could we expect anybody else to have anything but an extreme reaction to the situation. I think it was logical for this girl to laugh, since she didn’t know how else to react.

     The people who laughed at the RA’s response to the blood drive story did so normally. Their laughter followed the superiority theory. The RA was making a joke about the logic behind the nurse’s strategy to draw blood. One wouldn’t think it’d be easier to hit a vein when the donor is laughing. This shows the ridiculousness of the situation.

     The laugh lurker assignment was a good learning experience. It allowed me to put the theories we’ve been learning about into perspective. Although the conversation I observed wasn’t the most conventional comic situation, I still feel it’s relevant to the class and to the material we’re learning.