It was in seventh or eighth grade that I asked John Grubbs how it was that he made people laugh. I loved to see people laugh and wondered how so often people around John would be laughing. He didn’t make people laugh in a “class clown” sort of way. I didn’t realize then that what I was enjoying was not the provoking of laughter but the releasing of it. I do know now, though, and I love to hear released laughter.

I don’t recall John’s words, but his response boiled down to “don’t make them laugh, let them laugh.” Of course, it was stated as a 13-year old kid, but it is remembered thusly at this age.

I don’t think anyone with blood coursing through their veins can resist smiling or laughing when they hear the sound of a baby’s laugh. Laughing is contagious that way. It is especially so for me when I am with my three sons. With them, and only with them, I can release such uncontrollable laughter that I sound like a squeaky little girl.

I include smiling because of my dad. I don’t recall ever hearing him laugh, much less belly laugh. My mom said that when he was young, which was well before I was born, he had a “cute laugh.” By the time that I arrived, life had squeezed the laugh out of him (battles against demons, loss of a daughter to leukemia at five, struggles of self-employment) and left him with smiles. His smiles brought to me the same satisfaction that laughter would to a deaf person: the sense of happiness and enjoyment that can be seen by the world. What couldn’t be heard could be felt.

Laughter can come and go. Much of mine had become MIA until life took a different path and it began to reappear. It was released more often. In the last eight years or so, I would say that not a day has gone by that I have not enjoyed several good laughs and been in the presence of someone for whom laughter has been released.

There is plenty of medical research that reveals the value of heartfelt laughter. Laughter is the best medicine, as the saying goes. It is more than that. Joseph Pearce wrote,” Laughter is indeed divine, but it is also a great mystery which continues to elude the grasp of the philosopher and the mystic. ’There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth,’ wrote Chesterton; ‘and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.’”

I will leave the depth of understanding laughter to those who are much wiser and intelligent than me. For me, I’ll enjoy day after day of life that includes laughter, be it my own or that of others.

This blog section is titled Philo, which is Greek for loving, as in love of: for example, philanthropy: love of people/humanity; philosophy: love of knowledge or wisdom. My writings for Philo examine “love of” many things — both subtle and sublime — that comprise life and living.