part of what i find so compelling about comedy / humor is the embodied release it offers. laughing is a form of breathing. breath of different sizes and lengths. breath expressing gladness, amusement, futility. breath as a form of or path to or practice of surrender.
that we could laugh and make more room in our rib cages, make more space in our nervous systems. how laughter might allow us to breathe easier, to—as my grandmama said this week—“hang loose.”
as Ross Gay points out, both laughter and yawning are contagious.1 breath spreading, deeper. contagion - con meaning with - tag meaning to touch. laughing with, laughing as being touched or moved.
laughter most often shared, “to jump on in that laugh you laughed.”2
and it is impossible to hoard breath — to hold it in is to perish. as Ashon Crawley writes:
breath is relational, an ongoing exchange with other beings, an ongoing exchange with atmosphere and place. in the words of Ramsay Taum:
i read these two paragraphs close together on the plane to so called oakland, breathing in recycled air. i was floored by their echo of each other, their resonance. the person sitting next to me kept laughing at the show they were watching, and though i couldn’t hear it—to hear the laughter was enough. made me soften in the dark plane cabin, high above the earth.
in and out. out and in. this mirth keeping us.
Ross Gay, Inciting Joy, p. 80 ↩
The Source of Self Regard, Toni Morrison James Baldwin Eulogy p. 232 ↩
The Lonely Letters, Ashon Crawley, p. 235 ↩
Ramsay Taum interviewed by Isabel Flower “Reverence Over Reference'“ in Deem: A Sense of Place // this relational understanding of breath was shaped by this podcast episode https://forthewild.world/podcast-transcripts/tiffany-lethabo-king-on-the-black-shoals-315 ↩