This “Try Not to Smile or Laugh” challenge makes me laugh so bad in that it is funny not only in the short videos but also in those participants' reaction. In my opinion, the boy in the green T-shirt is the most hilarious one among them. When watching the concert one, which shows the audience is so excited that sing really terrible, he criticized her seriously and said that 'if she wanna sing, she gonna sing right'. Although I cannot figure out why he said that, the way he reacted is totally out of my expectation. And there are other people who try as hard as possible to suppress their desire to laugh always have suffering faces, and some of them even try to change their facial expression into surprising. These unusual and unnatural facial expression become other sources of my laugh. If I track the theory behind my laughing, I think that would be superiority theory, because I laugh that they cannot release their original feelings like me and although they challenged successfully in the end, I got more happiness than they got. Therefore, I had the same feeling with the boy who said, “The idea of a laugh challenge makes me laugh.”
In addition, I watched this video twice. The first time was watched by myself, and the second time was with my friends. I found it is much easier to laugh when there are people surrounded. My friends are not usually laugh as easily as I do, so whenever they found it is funny, I unconsciously laugh harder, just like when I saw the participants laugh. When we were laughing, these videos suddenly become the link which bond us together. It is not important about what was showing, but the connection between my friends and I. At that moment, comedy is like the tool of communicating. It has magic to bring people together just by laughing out loud, and in this way, audiences who laugh together can know that they have same type of laughing which maybe suggests that they have same interest and they are same type of people.
You've come up with an interesting idea about superiority theory: that it is the reason we laugh at people who cannot or are unwilling to laugh. By this theory, the only superiority in comedy is over those people who don't get the joke, see the humor, or are unable to see it. And this version of superiority would actually fit with Hutcheson.
回复删除Certainly having a set of friends to watch with can only make this effect stronger. when we are together with like minded people, it only becomes easier to laugh at people who aren't laughing (although, as Hutcheson suggests, they are always invited to laugh with us).