Uncontrollable Laughter

            About 2 weeks ago my roommate and I were watching TV and nothing good was on. I suggested we check out Netflix and see if there was something that would be somewhat entertaining. In the recently watched section we noticed that my brother had been watching a cartoon called Adventure Time. I vaguely recalled him talking to me about it one time so we started an episode to see if it was any good or not. The intro alone is enough to either make you laugh or extremely confused. Nick and I looked at each other confused and just started cracking up. The intro is so strange that the only thing we could do was laugh. There wasn’t any other reaction to the oddity of this cartoon. The episode preceded and with each passing minute the cartoon became more and more strange. The basic premise of the show is a human and his talking magical dog go on adventures through this different world/dimension. Along the way they encounter and defeat ridiculous monsters to save various princesses. Princess such as: Princess Bubblegum, lumpy Space Princess, Embryo princess and a few others. Anyway you get the point that this show is strange. If you don’t think their names are weird enough I encourage you to Google pictures of what they actually look like. To add to the oddity things just morph and come out of nowhere. I don’t really even know how to describe it. It is the trippiest show I have ever seen. Nothing makes sense and the creators of this show were and still are on what seems to be ungodly amounts of illegal substances. With all this being said it is one of the funniest shows I have ever seen. It is so ridiculous and out there you can’t help but laugh. We laughed cause we were confused, we laughed because nothing ever ended up happening like you would expect it to. We laughed at simply how absurd certain aspects of the show were. Below are some gifs of the show (if they are working) and you can see how weird this is and these are tame compared to the rest of the show! As you can imagine we laughed until we cried and almost peed ourselves so naturally we stayed up all night watching this awesome show that is supposedly supposed to be a kids show.

            Now that we have a little knowledge of the philosophy of humor (thanks to Comic Relief) I’ve been thinking about why this actually makes me laugh so hard. It might have had something to do with our slapstick nature due to the time of night at the end of a long week but I think it is a little deeper than that. I also believe that the uncontrollable laughter was the result of a couple key factors. First, because we were tired and looking to relax at the end of a long week we were already in “play mode” before we even started watching the show. This factor right here set the stage for what would soon be a large fit of laughter. The second crucial factor was the shows use of extreme cognitive shift. This cognitive shift wasn’t necessarily used explicitly to be funny but rather just to be absurd which the show is known for being. However, the state of play that we were already in allowed us to find enjoyment of the cognitive shift in the show, which was expressed through laughter. The laughter snowballed out of control because the cognitive shifts just keep coming. Nothing that one expects to happen actually happens and the use of crazy color and visuals makes watching this show a strange yet enjoyable experience. Even though these adventures that the characters embark on have a sense of “danger” and peril it isn’t viewed that way due to the fictitious nature of the show. One it is a cartoon so just as we saw with the Wile E. Coyote a playful attitude can be taken towards the “dangerous” situations due to the incredibly obvious fictionalization of the show.

            All of these factors added up to create the perfect storm of laughter. I also forgot to mention that the fact that I was watching it in a social situation added to the humor of the show. If I watched the show alone I don’t think it would’ve had the same effect. I might have chuckled every now and then but nothing close to the laughter I experienced with company. I believe that if any of the factors I described above were different this rare, but fun fit of laughter wouldn’t have occurred.