Why Do We Laugh? A Personal Reflection

Humor has always been part of who I am. After school, I’d race home for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I’d rewatch Rush Hour endlessly and sneak episodes of Chappelle’s Show way before I was old enough to get half the jokes.

Laughter was just laughter back then—simple, instinctive, easy. But as I got older, comedy became a way to connect, break tension, and survive rough days. It stopped feeling random and started to feel essential, which made me wonder: Why do we laugh? What’s happening when something’s funny? What makes me laugh?

When I started digging, I realized that even with all our personal quirks, a lot of what makes us laugh follows a few simple patterns.

Did not see that coming

The first pattern that stood out was incongruity. It’s the kind of humor that comes from things not fitting together the way we expect. Our brains constantly predict what happens next based on logic, context, or experience. When something unexpected slips in and we realize it still makes a weird kind of sense, it feels funny.

In elementary school, our teacher invited us to a farewell party at her house. Midway through, her adult son walked in and yelled, “Mommy!” Everyone burst out laughing. As kids, we imagined teachers as strict, almost mythical figures who lived inside school walls. Realizing she was someone’s actual mom shattered that illusion.

The Fresh Prince thrives on incongruity—Will Smith, street-smart and loud, drops into a world of gated mansions and rigid manners. Rush Hour works the same way: Jackie Chan’s reserved Hong Kong cop pairs with Chris Tucker’s rule-breaking American detective. East meets West. Order meets chaos. It shouldn’t work, and that’s exactly why it does.

“Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”—yes, that scene from Rush Hour (1998)

At least I’m not that guy

Incongruity explains a lot of laughter, but not all of it. Sometimes, we laugh because someone else slips up, and part of us enjoys feeling just a little superior.

This is the home of slapstick, roasts, satire, sports bloopers, and cringe content. It’s why Fail compilations rack up millions of views. Reality TV taps into the same instinct: watching people overshare, melt down, miss the obvious, and thinking we’d do better. Sitcoms do the same, but with characters who are socially clueless or blissfully unaware. We, being in on the joke, get to feel clever for noticing what they can’t.

Chappelle’s Show pushed this even further. It invited us to laugh at characters chasing street cred, clinging to pride, or buying into stereotypes, only to crash into reality. But it didn’t stop there. It turned the mirror on us, exposing the contradictions we all live with.

That was close

Not every laugh comes from feeling clever or superior. Sometimes, it sneaks out right after fear—your heart races, you brace for disaster… and then realize everything’s fine. Your body lets out a laugh not because it’s actually funny, but because the relief needs somewhere to go.

You see it after jump scares in movies. It also shows up in prank videos where people pose as statues, only to suddenly move and startle unsuspecting passersby.

You feel it in everyday embarrassments: waving at someone who wasn’t waving at you, saying “you too” when the server says “enjoy your meal,” or blasting music across a silent café because your headphones weren’t connected.

Context is everything

Even nervous laughter doesn’t happen in a vacuum. What we find funny depends heavily on where we are, who we’re with, and the culture we come from. Some people love puns and clever wordplay; others lean toward dark humor or slapstick.

At my first job out of school, I was baffled by my colleagues. Why were they praising the weather when it was obviously miserable? Why did they insist they were having a great time while looking visibly stressed? It took me a while to recognize the dry, ironic tone of Swedish humor—a style rooted in understatement and subtle sarcasm. I hadn’t grown up with that. My parents were raised in Mao-era China, where that kind of humor wasn’t just discouraged, but could get you into serious trouble.

What I find funny

Over time, my taste in humor shifted. I don’t find loud, exaggerated comedy—the kind with wild gestures, silly voices, or clown-level antics—as funny anymore. Real life, as it turns out, is often stranger and more absurd than anything you could write.

Take American Psycho or The Wolf of Wall Street. Both set out to mock greed and excess, but audiences ended up idolizing the very behaviors they satirized. We have things like The Line in Saudi Arabia, a trillion-dollar monument to extreme hubris dressed up as urban innovation.

And then there’s America, a democracy staging its own 2025 version of the Cultural Revolution, the same disaster that shaped my parents’ China. Since I might need to travel across the pond this year, I’ll keep my mouth shut.

With the world already serving up so much unintentional comedy, sitcoms feel stale. Watching livestreams, the kind where internet personalities wander public spaces while viewers trigger robot-voiced messages and random soundbites, further desensitized me. Imagine blasting North Korean propaganda across a silent train in South Korea. Nothing scripted can match such incongruity and nervous laughter.

These days, I’m drawn to humor that’s subtle, layered, and punches up.

After getting ridiculed online for his Elden Ring build, Elon Musk tried to stage a comeback. When Path of Exile 2 launched, he secretly hired top players to boost his character just so he could pretend to be an elite gamer on stream.

Watching YouTubers tear it apart had me dying—not just at the roasting, but at the richest-man-in-the-world ego behind it. The desperation for approval. The blind loyalty of his fans. It was all layered, ridiculous—and painfully human.

Why humor matters to me

We laugh more around people we like.

For me, humor is a glimpse into someone’s wit, creativity, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness. It signals how sharply they think, how lightly they move through the world, and whether they can see themselves with a little grace.

Maybe I’m too cynical, but life is full of hard truths. Most of us are faking confidence, chasing approval, and hoping no one notices we’re just winging it. We value image over substance, flood silence with noise, and confuse validation for truth. The loudest voices often know the least.

And yet, we can’t always be honest. Not at work. Not with strangers. Sometimes not even with ourselves. We have roles to perform, expectations to meet, and—let’s be real—jobs to keep. The truth hurts. It challenges pride. It cuts through pretense.

But humor, especially the kind that smuggles truth inside a laugh, gives us a back door. It lets us say what we mean without being confrontational. The people who can do this remind us of something important: it’s okay to be a little messy, a little wrong, a little ridiculous sometimes.

We’re all just trying to hold it together.