A cute video of a baby laughing its head off has been doing the rounds on Twitter this week. He is sitting in a cardboard box as it’s dragged along by the family dog. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (Rospa) may frown at such a caper, but their concerns wouldn’t bother this bairn, for the lad’s quite helpless with mirth. Naturally, his joy is infectious.
When I was not much older than a baby, I was obsessed with Led Zeppelin. In the live recording of Stairway to Heaven at Madison Square Garden in 1973, Robert Plant follows up the lyric about forests echoing with laughter with a question for the crowd: “Does anyone remember laughter?” he enquires plaintively. Even as a devotee of his work, I remember thinking this plea a bit on the dismal side. But now, looking at the delight of the baby in the box, I find myself asking a similar question: does anyone remember laughing like that? You know, laughing and fearing you may never stop laughing, laughing so hard it hurts, laughing so uncontrollably that you’re crying, actually crying. It does still happen, of course, but less often. Or perhaps that’s just me.
Most of us whose children were born in the video age have footage, somewhere, similar to that of the baby in the box. Perhaps this kind of uncontrolled, hysterical laughter is the sort of laughter with which we’re born. The only one we know. After all, when was the last time you saw a baby deliver a wry chuckle or a single loud guffaw? No, once they start they can’t stop. I suppose it happens less and less because learning to control your emotions is part of growing up. If we didn’t develop the necessary skills, we’d all be walking around either bawling our eyes out or crying with laughter.
It is interesting that “hysterical” is the adjective often used to describe this kind of laughter. In my dictionary, hysteria is defined as “a psychoneurosis in which repressed complexes become split off or dissociated from the personality, forming independent units, partially or completely unrecognised by consciousness”. And so it goes on, in ever more impenetrable language. With this in mind, I look again at the baby in the box and, for the life of me, can’t pick up any sense of repressed complexes coming to the surface. What I can identify is an element of fear, of uncertainty, which is quite understandable given that the lad’s being dragged around by an excitable animal twice his size. Perhaps hysterical laughter arises out of fear and uncertainty and it’s this we lose as we get older. Or perhaps not. I for one have plenty of fear and uncertainty to be going on with.
So how do I get to experience more often the magic felt by the baby in the box? I suppose drugs might do the trick. I had a friend in Birmingham who used to take magic mushrooms for this very reason. “Oh, mate,” he’d tell me. “You’ve never known laughter like it.” His surest route to untrammelled mirth was to drink mushroom tea while watching Family Fortunes on the box. He begged me to join him, but I chickened out.
Don’t get me wrong, I laugh all the time, but not helplessly, like the baby in the box. What I miss most is the aftermath, when the joyous fit has passed and you’re left tear-stained and exhausted, deliciously spent. As a middle-aged bloke, the only regular comparable experience might be sneezing. You know a big one’s coming and you know there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s the moment of uncertainty when you wonder if you’ll even survive its magnitude. Though slightly afraid, you will it on. And, bang, it happens. Oh, the release. You’re left relieved but wrung out. But it’s no substitute; it’s nice, but no laughing matter.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
