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Precious Ruffin

Professor Jeffrey Orderlin

English 1

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Lol

Laughing is a natural stress reliever. Healthy lifestyle says when you start laughing, it

doesn't just lighten your load mentally, it actually induces physical changes in your body.

Laughing can stimulate many organs, activate and relieve your stress response, and soothe

tension. But these are just the short term effect of laughter. In the article Phantom in the Brain

"The Women Who Died Laughing" by Ramachandran and Sandra Brakeslee, believes we laugh

because the false alarm theory. He believes we laugh to relieve stress from an event that was high

in tension, to give are friends or close peers the alert that it was a false alarm.

Laughing is part of my everyday life. Why do some people laugh in a stressful situation?

Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee argues that we laugh to communicate that

some misperceived event is harmless known as the false alarm theory. My story does not support

this theory. But Philosopher John Morreall’s relief theory; i laugh because the release of nervous

energy. Is the best theory that argues, my laugh was my nervous release. It was halloween the

night of terror. I was dressed as spider witch and i felt mature because my mom let me wear

makeup that year to go with my costume. My cousin was dressed as the devil but the older ones

didn't dress up. On Halloween night all the kid’s love but are the most scared. Scared for

something to jump at me, my nerves we already high. Morreall argues “that laughter relieves

pent-up nervous energy.”(morreall) I was already nervous before i left my house to go

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trick-or-treating. We walk down a dark road with witch laughter coming from the houses.

Holding my aunts hand i felt safe. But that all changed when men with masked came out the dark

alley with butcher knives. They walked toward us that's when i froze completely unable to move.

My aunt grab my younger cousin dressed as the devil and told me “ruuun.” I couldn't move one

inch. Instead I let out a little nervous laugh. In Morreall he quotes Herbert Spencer “laughter

releases nervous energy.”

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Work Cited

Tibbetts, Paul. “Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind. V. S.

Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee.” The Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 74, no. 3, 1999, pp.

365–366., doi:10.1086/393234.

Morreall, John. “Philosophy and Religion.” The Primer of Humor Research Humor Research,

2008, pp. 211–242., doi:10.1515/9783110198492.211.

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