HUMOUR
Laughing, yawning & crying with Ndumiso Ngcobo
In retrospect, it really wasn’t all that funny. Picture it. Four fellows in a VW Polo, driving from Johannesburg to Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal to attend a function. One of them, Gopolang, randomly refers to Tsepe, the driver, as “the bear”. This is followed by a few seconds of silence. The silence is broken by Zamani, the third guy, laughing softly. After a few seconds the soft laughter degenerates into a hysterical giggling fit. The fourth guy, yours truly, also starts laughing even though he’s not certain what’s so funny. But it’s damn near impossible to not join in the laughter when everyone around you is busy losing it. The “bear’s” shoulders are also shaking with laughter.
Finally, feeling a bit silly about laughing for no reason, I ask what’s so funny. Zamani responds by pointing at the driver, “Look; he’s really a bear!” I peep at Tsepe’s reflection in the rearview mirror and — slap me down on a frying pan and sear me until I’m medium rare — with his salt-andpepper stubble, the bugger really does resemble a Grizzly! My laughter accelerates from a stifled snigger to an uncontrollable laughing fit. And then Gopolang, the instigator of the cacklea-thon, yells out in contrived Ebonics, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! The burr!” and we all lose it.
Afterwards, the fact hits us that we are a quartet of grown-up family men, with 10 children between us, who have just chortled like a bunch of convent school teenagers discovering the word “fellatio”.
Why were we laughing so hard? Finally, we settle on the most “rational” explanation, just to make ourselves feel normal again. We decide that laughter is more contagious than measles.
How many times have you been in the company of someone laughing so uncontrollably they cannot even articulate why they’re laughing? How many times has that made you start laughing almost as hard, even though you had no idea what they were laughing at? It’s nearly impossible to keep a straight face for long while someone is slapping their thigh, tears and snot running down their face, gasping for air.
Most of the time, by the time they tell you what they’re laughing at, you don’t find it even mildly amusing. Yet a few seconds earlier you were out of breath with laughter.
Laugher is not the only transmittable human physiological process. Stifling a yawn after someone else yawns in your presence is a Herculean feat for most of us.
The human yawn is so infectious that it’s apparently even transmittable to dogs. And I’ll wager that after I mentioned that titbit, at least 63.7% of readers tried unsuccessfully to fight off a yawn festival. Followed by yawning in the general direction of Rasputin, the family Labrador, to test the theory. Predictably, I have yawned at least 20 times in the time it has taken me to write this paragraph.
Duke University conducted a scientific study on the phenomenon. This is presumably after they got assurances that food security, threats from GMO, HIV, tuberculosis and psychological disorders that cause chronic selfie-taking were adequately covered by other universities. I’m assuming they sent out research assistants to downtown Durham,
North Carolina, to yawn in the vicinity of unsuspecting research participants and record their findings.
Until about a year ago, I didn’t realise that crying was another communicable human disease. That was when I found myself in the company of two friends, Nomo and Zamani (of The Bear incident), at the Parkmore Tops in Sandton. Our collective ability to turn tap water into gin had failed us, you see.
Zamani was, at the time, sharing with us a personal crisis he was going through. Being the intelligent, sensitive and appropriately evolved man of the 21st century without Neanderthal ancestors that he is, at some point he started leaking salt water through his eyes.
Slightly embarrassed, he berated himself with the refrain, “Keep it together, Zamani!”
Feeling the onset of a lump in my gullet, I averted my eyes from him towards Nomo to gather the strength to offer our friend some soothing words. But something seemed, at that very moment, to have lodged in both Nomo’s eyes, because they had gone moist and red.
Amazed by the incredible happenstance, I must have stopped blinking, leaving both my eyes open to invasion by a crowd of gnats, because they were soon burning and swimming in salt water as well.
The sight of three black men with salt water in their eyes walking towards the parking lot would have freaked out the car guard on duty.
Fortunately, at this very moment, I started yawning.
He berated himself: ‘Keep it together, Zamani!’