Can laughter Get You Into Trouble? (Satis Shroff)

Can Laughter Get You Into Trouble? (Satis Shroff)

Children and grown ups in Europe, Africa, Asia and the USA are linked with this common mirth and joy of laughter across the Atlantic, for we all laugh within or without.  

 

A group of ladies who claim they were ejected from California’s Napa Valley wine train for ‘laughing while black’ are to file a $11m racial discrimination lawsuit against the train company. The reason they want to sue the company is not for money but to raise awareness that racism was still rife across American society.

 

Lisa Renee Johnson, one of the book group members, chronicled the incident on Twitter using the hashtag #laughingwhileblack, and they belonged to the Sistahs of Reading Edge book club. The group comprised 10 African American members and a white female member. The ages of the ladies were from 50 to 85.

 

The Brit laughs decently because his society is like a straight-jacket with its social norms and values. As we have seen in the past colonial times, the only time a Brit was able to behave like he felt was when he went native (sans social sanctions from a spouse or his colonial administrators. Otherwise he's always afraid of making a fool of himself in front of others. The Swabians and Badener laugh heartily. And while watching slapstick the whole world laughs, irrespective of creed or colour.

 

The Emancipation Proclamation was celebrated in the USA as a day of whooping and laughing on the part of the freed slaves.

 

African Americans are bestowed with divine gifts of joy, mirth, music, laughter and dance. OMG, have you watched Michael Jackson dancing? Amazing gyrations, spins, synchronised movement of the entire rump and extremities..

 

In 'Harlem Shadows' laughter occurs in McKay's Jamaican childhood, replete with nostalgia for the tropical weather and landscape, childish innocence and island culture.

Up north, the children's 'laugh is swallowing in the deafening roar,
Of captive wind in the NY subways
That moan for fields and seas.'

 

 

Toni Morrison speaks of similar freedom and laughter in 'Beloved' where Baby Suggs expresses her feeling of being free for the first time by exclaiming, 'These hands belong to me. These my hands,' and she had to cover her mouth because she was laughing out so loud.

When I was new in Germany we went to the Black Forest with some German student-friends and an African from Nigeria was also with us. It was so delightful to hear the sounds of surprise he made when he saw and felt snow for the first time. He was cooing and laughing and showing it to us in his infectious delight.

 

Every psychologist and every doctor knows that nothing is more contagious than...signs of emotion, particularly laughing and pecularities of speech. (CG Jung). Carl Jung seeking the psychology of the average American and asking why the USA as a nation can laugh said: 'The African American with his primitive motility, his expressive emotionality, his childlike immediacy..has infected American behaviour.'

 

 

Whiteys from the southern states of America racialized the acoustic laughter and stigmatised African Americans as innately noisy and then wanted to have this laughter, that came from the heart, disciplined and managed, almost by law.

 

I've always taken delight in watching Africans greet each other with gimme-fives, hugs and laughter and clapping of hands. A smile burst into laughter, like the sun breaking through the clouds, and it says: I'm awfully glad to see you in person.

 

'Even in Moscow, where I heard and saw
The human voice and presence of Lenin
Colour laughing richly their delight,
And reigning over all the colour Red.'

The Russians laugh heartily and clap your shoulders. Vodka in the blood? Ah, the Russian Soul.

 

A German likes to crush the hand of the other and calls it a handshake. It's more a show of strength and power. I prefer a Nepalese 'namaste' with no bodily contacts but a well-meaning, hearty message: I greet the Godliness in you.