Laughter and chaos

It is one thing to acknowledge the world’s imperfections, and quite another thing to deal with them. The world of many human beings is chaotic, forgetful, shifty and just not working well. When moved from small hunting and farming communities into big cities with complex organizations, our brains were not prepared for this. Thankfully, we had evolved a laughing animal. Simply put, when something is too strange, or too frightening, or too stressful, we show our teeth (it originates in aggression), and feel fine after all.  OK, I could not figure it out, and this is too complicated, and this should not happen, but I can ignore it, because it is funny! But what does it mean when something or someone is funny? It simply means we don’t have to deal with it in a regular way, don’t need to know why, don’t need to apply ethical judgments, don’t need to feel angry or guilty about it. It is dismissed – to funny. Laughter is a non-resolution that allows us to resolve problems. When someone is trying to crack a joke in a meeting, one is inviting the others to get pass the problem, to set it aside, and just take it lighter. There is too much chaos in the world to deal with it, so we laugh.

• Funny when people want to spend a lot of time talking about unimportant things, and run out of time to talk about the life and death situations. I do the same all the time; still funny. Why does everything in higher ed take at least a year to accomplish? Because we spend half of each meeting finding the time for another meeting next month. Next month, we forget where we left off last month. First eight meetings we spend talking about silly details, and there are only nine working months in a school year. In the last meeting, we make tremendously important decisions in the last fifteen minutes, without thinking too much.
• The inability to admit and say openly what is at issue – extremely funny.
• Funny how I assume you want it, and you assume I want it, while neither of us want it. So we do it anyway and both hate it. Then we forget what we did and wonder why we hate each other.
• Complaining about doing things we brought upon ourselves is funny. Not always, but most of the time. 
• Funny when we won’t let other people do something, because it is our job to do, but not doing it because we have too much to do.
• Worrying is funny, mainly because it never helps, but we keep doing it.
• When you sit down and talk to someone, you are reasonably sure you can do this and that, only to realize later on, you can’t really do it. This bias to over-promise and over-commit is just so weird, it’s funny.
• How we push deadlines earlier, because we figure, people won’t be on time, so we need extra time. People figure out we figured it out, and assume the real deadline to be much later, but they don’t know when.
• With more education and more experience, we are less likely to admit doing stupid things. It should be the other way around, isn’t it? People with Ph.D. unable to figure out the simplest thing – I am one of them – now, that’s really funny.
• When we don’t understand someone’s motives, we just make them up. Funny how we cannot tolerate the unexplained, but are fine with the completely fabricated.
• How only little stupid thing that happens once every hundred years prompts everyone to implement new rules that take time to comply with every day.  
• Funny how bosses’ suggestions become directives, while directives may remain suggestions.
• Repeatedly saying stupid things because of speed-reading habits, and yet doing it again.
• Forgetting whole conversations, as if they never happened. Remembering the conversation in detail, and well as all arguments on both sides, but completely blanking out on the resolution… Remembering what you decided, but completely forgetting why you decided it is hilarious, because you have to quickly invent another rationale.

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