When Getting the Giggles Can Get You in a Pickle

When Margaret Pinnington told her 16-year-old daughter, Suzanne, that her grandfather had died, the teenager exploded into bellows of laughter.

“I had to go upstairs because everyone wanted to kill me,” says Suzanne Beshoff, now 35 and living in Santa Ana. “It was just awful. My grandmother was thinking I was the meanest person in the world. I was fighting it because I felt so badly for her.”

Uncontrollable nervous laughter in response to a tragedy, an injury, or during a somber event such as a wedding or funeral is a normal human behavior, say psychologists, even though it rates as a social faux pas of the first order.

Why do we laugh when the culturally correct response would be to cry?

Laughing and crying provide the same kind of physiological stress release. Excessive laughter makes us weep and intense crying sometimes makes us laugh.

“Nervous laughter is a defense when experiencing feelings that are uncomfortable,” says Helen Friedman, a clinical psychologist and radio talk show host in St. Louis. “It is a way of relieving anxiety or discharging some of the energy connected with these feelings that are so overwhelming.”

But what determines whether the expression will be laughing or crying?

“There seems to be some sort of cognitive function that shunts the expression into laughing instead of crying,” says Stuart P. Fischoff, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles. “Nervous laughter is some sort of built-in biological stress mechanism. It is very contagious for adults as well as children. Children, when their parents start to yell at them, will start to laugh . . . which might make a parent laugh. Maybe this is an evolutionary survival tactic so that parents won’t kill their kids?”

Apparently it worked for Beshoff, whose mother and grandmother spared her life.

But her nervous laughter has taken her into even more precarious situations. In 1985, Beshoff, a native of England, was deported from Los Angeles International Airport because she hadn’t yet received her green card.

“These four [immigration agents] put me in this room and they were calling me names and yelling at me,” she recalls. “I was laughing hysterically and all the time I was thinking I wanted to cry. I was terrified they were going to put me into jail overnight. It was a nightmare. They put me on a plane. I waved to them from the plane and was laughing hysterically.”

Aside from being an emotional defense mechanism, Fischoff says, nervous laughter is disarming in social relations, especially where a reflexive tittering erupts out of embarrassment.

“Women do this more than men,” he says. “But when you are embarrassed, it is not funny. Laughter is a way of disarming the person you are embarrassed in front of.”

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Then there is the spasmodic giggle in response to another’s misfortune.

Kimberley Heaton-McCarthy, 29, was enjoying a little dual domestic cleaning bliss with her spouse, she in the top cupboard, he in the bottom, when she departed for some dishes--leaving the top door swung open. Up he stood, only to crack himself so hard on the head that he landed on his derriere, out cold.

“He did the whole eye-roll thing,” recalls Heaton-McCarthy, a Santa Barbara county planner who lives in Montecito. “I had to leave the room and laugh with my face buried into the pillow because I knew if he saw me he was going to kill me when he regained consciousness and control of his limbs. I always laugh when people get hurt, especially in that pratfall kind of way. It is very inappropriate. I don’t know why, but when I get on a roll, the more I want to stop laughing the more I can’t do it.”

Exactly.

“You can try to suppress it, but that is when you bite your mouth into a bloody pulp,” Fischoff says. “You are really trying to prevent a natural flow of emotion and if you would just let it go the first time, it would stop. My advice is go out and finish your laughter to the sky and hope it doesn’t start again.”

That’s fine, if you can gracefully escape. But if you can’t, it’s every person for him- or herself. (One woman who had a chronic problem laughing in high school used to gain control by saying to herself over and over: “Dead puppies, dead puppies, dead puppies.”)

For Beshoff, timeouts seem to help.

“I was playing tennis with this woman and she tripped and fell and all you could see was her bum in the air,” she says. “She was a heavy woman and everyone was worried she was hurt and I couldn’t speak. I finally went into the bathroom, laid down on floor and busted up.”