There was a massive wave of laughter as I walked back to my seat. The play was Sheer Madness at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and they were laughing at a particularly broad joke at the top of the second act.
'On man that's cheap,' I thought as I continued to the back of the house. The show was already one of the longest running shows in the United States and that was 15 years ago -- and it's still running! I had seen it maybe six times because my then girlfriend (now wife) was playing the ditzy hairdresser role for the last year.
I was not in the mood to see it again. But as I trudged up the bleachers I stopped listening to the play and focused on the laughter. The audience had completely lost it and by the time I got back to my seat I had too.
In his outrageously insightful book on Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman says, 'Nature loves good timing. The sciences find synchronies throughout the natural world, whenever one natural process entrains or oscillates in rhythm with another. When waves are out of synch, they cancel each other; when they synchronize, they amplify. In the natural world, pacing occurs with everything from ocean waves to heartbeats; in the interpersonal realm, our emotional rhythms entrain.'
He notes that our bodies are way ahead of our minds when it comes to this kind of thing and that the rhythm or prosody of speech can align us with another before the meaning of the words sinks in. This protoconversation, as he calls it, has the power to either connect or disconnect us depending on if we're in the groove or not.
That's all nice to know but the laugh's the thing!
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