Tales from a newly-wed: Laughing till your drink squirts out of your nose!

 Generally speaking, I’m not someone who sneers at other people’s physical appearance.

Glass houses, etc. 

There's a remarkably persistent belief among some people that our looks are somehow a signifier of our personality.  Good Disney princesses are always picture-perfect – young, slender, doe-eyed, straight-toothed. A century ago, photographs existed of different physical types denoting the characteristics of criminals – eyes too close together, lips too thin, monobrows, etc. And let’s face it, we all know wicked witches are always old with hairy warts and hooked noses, clutching broomsticks they never use to sweep the floor. And all grannies who are both old and good are also plump and pretty with sweet smiles and hands covered in flour from all that baking.

People can’t help how they look, after all. I’m short, fat, wear glasses and have an unattractive overbite, but I don’t think I deserve mockery for these things (there are plenty of other things about me that are eminently mockable). I also don’t think I should go into debt to pay for laser eye surgery and expensive dentistry, just so I don’t scare the horses. Yes, being overweight is technically self-inflicted, but in reality its causes are complex and multi-faceted, and its cure is long and difficult. Why add to someone’s misery? No one likes being unattractive, and outer appearance says little if anything about inner beauty – talent, intelligence, kindness, compassion. Or inner nastiness, if it comes to that!

So, I don’t usually find critical comments about other people’s appearance very amusing. Unless, of course, the object of the criticism is Donald Trump or Boris Johnson (but even then, I think there are much more serious and important things to criticize, and laughing at their hair just dilutes the point).

              Despite this disclaimer, I was shaken out of my current fug of mild depression yesterday by P making a very out-of-character remark.

              He returned from answering the door, holding a package.

              ‘It’s for you,’ he said. ‘It was delivered by a morlock.’

              A morlock, for those of you who don’t know, is the subterranean creature invented by H.G.Wells in his classic novella The Time Machine. In the book, humans have evolved into two sub-species – the delicate, innocent, beautiful Eloi who spend their days making daisy chains as far as I can remember (it’s forty years since I read it, so cut me some slack!), and the ugly, stocky, pale [they were actually blue in the original film version], monstrous, cannibalistic morlocks.

              You also have to appreciate the context. P rarely makes jokes about other people’s appearances. He is a kind man who would hate to hurt anyone’s feelings. He gets upset if he inadvertently says something that offends someone (as when he once asked one of his female students what she’d done to her hair and she ran off crying – he had no idea what he’d done to upset her. He’s an innocent let loose upon the world). So having him casually call a stranger a ‘morlock’ just struck me as particularly funny.

              In fact, let’s be honest, I thought it was hysterically funny. I hadn’t laughed in quite a while and I think the word ‘morlock’ triggered something deep in my soul. I was crying with laughter, almost wetting myself (which isn’t so difficult these days – you’ll know what I mean when you get to my age) – every time I calmed down, I would think of it again and set myself off. And, of course, that set P off too, as there are few things as infectious as a fit of the giggles.

              Giggling is a weird experience, isn’t it? Unlike ordinary laughter, which you can fake quite easily, giggling is beyond your control, and feels almost like something has broken inside you, releasing this crazy tsunami of laughter. You generally feel good afterwards, but it can also be incredibly embarrassing – and of course the ones that are most difficult to control are when you get a fit of the giggles at inappropriate moments.

Very often, the trigger for such laughter is not obvious to others, or seems out of proportion in its comic potential. Onlookers stare at you disapprovingly, wondering whether such a modestly humorous thing could really produce this wash of unruly abandon. Phrases like ‘my sides ached’ and ‘I laughed till I cried’ are not hyperbolic either. Giggling is sometimes painful. Like uncontrolled weeping, you can end up with red puffy eyes, aches and pains from the physical shaking, a sore throat. Both activities release stress and eventually make you feel better, however. And, while both crying and giggling can be triggered by minor things, their true root cause is often deeper and more profound. Giggling does feel like hysteria sometimes – out of control, out of proportion, often incomprehensible.

Anyway, an hour after the parcel delivery, P and I were in the car, and I kept thinking about morlocks – and, inevitably, this kept setting me off again. P was enjoying having made me laugh and he clearly wanted to do it again. At a junction, a car pulled onto the road where we were waiting and the middle-aged male driver was sticking his head out of the window as he turned the corner like someone leaning to one side for stability on a motorbike. This in itself was a source of amusement, but it was the man’s face that struck us both as funny. He was one of those older men who don’t have an ounce of spare fat on them but who aren’t weak-looking.  You know the type – they either spend every spare minute in the gym (every American actor in a long-running TV series after Season Three), or they work on a building site or a fishing boat. Their faces are weather-beaten, craggy, and look like they’ve been chiselled out of granite.

‘He must be in a rush to get back to the bridge,’ said P., then - seeing my mystified expression - he added: ‘to see if any billy-goats have turned up.’

Yes, my kind-hearted sensitive husband was making a troll-joke about a complete stranger!

This, of course, layered on top of the morlock comment, sent me into paroxysms.

What the hell was the matter with both of us?

‘At this very moment, people might be making insulting comments about the way we look,’ I pointed out, once I’d got myself back under control.

‘Yeah, they might be saying “Look at that owl driving that Hyundai”!’

Ok, I admit it. I once told P that his dad reminded me of an owl. He had a slightly beaky nose and big eyes. He was actually like a more heavily-built version of the actor Robert Donat (think The 39 Steps and The Winslow Boy). P’s dad died in 2016, but I have commented several times recently on how P is growing to resemble him more each year.

‘Maybe,’ continued P, ‘they might classify me as a new breed – the Northern Grey Scrawny Owl.’

                We laughed, but the urge to giggle like inebriated characters on Family Guy had passed, as mysteriously as it had arrived.  

                

                Maybe, sometimes, you just have to laugh at the outside of things, just to keep yourself sane.