We might think that crying and laughter are two very different emotions. But think about it: haven't you laughed so hard that you started feeling tears fall down your face at least once in your life? Yale University psychologist Dr. Oriana R. Aragón and her team claim that it's the body's way to regulate itself.
"People may be restoring emotional equilibrium with these expressions," she explained. "They seem to take place when people are overwhelmed with strong positive emotions, and people who do this seem to recover better from those strong emotions."
But this list is hardly about crying from laughter, is it? It's more about things that make us feel so desperate and helpless that we feel that all we can do is cry. Sometimes, we use laughter and humor to deflect so that we don't feel as much empathy.
As psychoanalyst and author of To Heal a Wounded Heart Pilar Jennings explains, sometimes laughter is the body's way of saying "I can't deal with this." If we allow ourselves to empathize with the person or the problem on a deeper level, we might open ourselves up to the same emotion. Thus, humor acts like a protective shield.
People also laugh when they're anxious or uncomfortable. Researchers speculate that it's how we relax in stressful situations, similar to laughter's function when we see something funny. Margaret Clark, professor of psychology at Yale University and co-author of the study "Dimorphous Expressions of Positive Emotion", also hypothesizes that it's how we let other people know that we need help to down-regulate our nervousness.
The "Funny and Sad" subreddit also fits in pretty well with the type of humor millennials enjoy. When we think about the TV shows, movies, and other media that we're consuming at the moment, it's hard not to notice how dark and absurd some of it is. In her article for The Guardian "'Horrifyingly absurd': how did millennial comedy get so surreal?" Rachel Aroesti points to shows like Rick and Morty, The Good Place, and BoJack Horseman.
Aroesti seeks to answer the question "Why is millennial humor so weird?" and suggests that it reflects the sentiments of many young people that the world just doesn't make sense anymore. In 2017, The Washington Post offered another reason: we're becoming more rootless with the delay of marriage, kids, and home ownership, and disillusion with religion, so all that gets reflected in the comedy and the content online that we consume.
Aroesti calls the shows she listed "sadcoms" and describes them as "a strain of comedy-drama shuddering under the weight of personal hardship and the idea that actual jokes are largely unnecessary." This type of humor, according to her, pierces the panic-inducing online news cycle and gives us at least some reprieve from the world going to bits.
