Laughter is the best medicine?

I was at the World Quest competition this morning at the University of Delaware Wilmington Campus. A question in our current events section came up asking about the name of the idiot who jumped out of a capsule in space. Everyone chuckled at the idiot comment and I was struck by the fact that we find pain in others kind of funny. Take America's Funniest Home Videos as an example. Almost every single video on there has to do with someone hurting themsleves in some kind of way. I'm not going to lie. It's funny as heck to see people hurt themselves but why do we do it? Do we simply ignore the fact that someone may have gotten seriously hurt, or do we just not care? The guy that jumped out of the capsule, was he wearing a parchute? Did he survive? Was he injured? Was he in the hospital? We don't ask these questions when we see a video of someone who has hurt themselves. We laugh. Of course if  the accident had happened right in front of us, we probably wouldn't have laughed. We probably would have rushed to see if the person was okay. So what makes watching people hurt themselves on tv so funny? Why doesn't it scare us like it would have if it was happening right in front of us?

I've also noticed that America as a whole finds crude humor to be very, very funny. My odyssey team decided to take a break during our meeting today and watch Kingsly and Jenna Marbles videos. I don't know if you have ever seen these videos, but they're on Youtube and the videos get more than a million views a week. Why do people watch them? Because they're funny. This afternoon was only the second time that I had ever seen a Jenna Marbles video and I didn't get the appeal. Yeah, sometimes she said something that was sort of funny, but I was turned off by the crude language that she used. Kingsly is the same. Comedy movies do the same thing. American comedy movies today usually have dirty humor in it. Not always, but most of the time they do. I don't usually find that funny. I don't laugh. Does that make me weird? I don't think so. I guess I just don't like that kind of humor.

Laughing is always good. It really is the best kind of medicine, but why do we laugh at things that we probably shouldn't laugh at? Why do we laugh when people get hurt, why do we laugh when a dirty joke is said, why do we laugh when we people curse? I laugh when America's Funniest Home Videos is on. I even laughed in the Hangover and goodness knows that that movie was full of crude humor. But I didn't laugh while watching the Dictator. Humor is different here. We laugh at the weirdest things sometimes. But, I guess that's just a part of our culture.