Uncontrollable Laughter – A day in the life of the Chi Omega House

Uncontrollable Laughter – A day in the life of the Chi Omega House

            A time recently I remember well uncontrollably laughing several times happen to be while watching the Grammies with my sorority sisters. We live in the Chi Omega house in the Greek. Living all together makes for a pretty good time. Everyone enjoys a laugh or a joke.  If you could read our GroupMe (an app for group messaging) this is evident.   From changing their names on the GroupMe to famous singers to posting photos eating toppers while working out it has an endless supply of funny messages.  I couldn’t ask for a funnier group of girls to live with.

            A group of 10 of us gathered together to watch the Grammies. From the red carpet to the final number laughter rang through the room. I can pin point a few moments of laughter but really the whole time we laughed.  When Lorde came on to the stage we were shocked. She didn’t look anything like what we had expected. We expected a young 17 year old girl with typical stylish and playful makeup and dress. What appeared on stage was neither. Lorde looked older to us more like 40 and was wearing all black.  Certainly not the picture we expected.  At that moment the room was silent. Then a moment or two later my friend Claire said she reminded her exactly like the evil witch in Snow White. This brought a onset of laughter. I had tears streaming down my eyes. We pulled up a picture and held it side by side, she did look very similar. We combined the theories of Superiority and Incongruity Theories.   We all believed without knowing it that we feel Superior to Lorde. Even though she is winning Grammy Award after Grammy Award we decided to judger her on how she looks. She doesn’t look typical to the stereotype of her ages as a singer. We decided we were better than her for that. The stereotype that all singers must be like Justin Bieber or Younger Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez helped us laugh at Lorde. We saw the ways she looked different she was incongruent with the ways the world portrays young artist.

            A stopped writing this about two weeks ago. I am back looking at it now. Realizing that he humor we were using was Negative Humor. In your uploaded notes you said, “Humor invariably relies on stereotypes that diminish individual identity”.  That is what we did. I can’t say I am proud of myself the girls in the room. I can’t say we are alone in doing this either. On a college campus most of the humor going around is negative. It breaks people down. Those few great moments where humor builds people up are few and far between. I think by looking at all the positive humor in class lately it is reminding of us all the funny little things that can be positive.

            Yes we laughed continuously throughout the night. Most of the time by making fun of someone else.  Looking back at it it strikes a sour note in my throat thinking of what we did. But how do we stop this? How do we stop a culture so defined by putting others down to build ones self up? Remind them of that funny YouTube video of bad lip reading. Remind them of a child like humor. That’s not a question I can really answer but maybe with this class I will be able too.