Fatima had a friend named Rania, who she called Rà from time to time. She loved her a lot. She was intelligent, quick-witted and droll. Anyway, they don’t see each other anymore, much to Fatima‘s bitter sorrow. One of Rania’s qualities that Fatima remembers with special affection was her boisterous sense of humour -- a sense of humour they shared. They would collapse in hilarious laughter at certain things. For Rania, the thing that most broke her up was the sight or the idea of somebody falling down. Just falling down was enough to unhinge her with laughter. However, it had to be an honest, accidental falling down, not a planned, arranged, theatrically-staged falling down. The person had to trip or slip or otherwise lose his or her balance and hit the ground. Then Rania would roll with laughter. And so would Fatima. In fact, she could make Rania laugh simply by telling her about someone she had seen fall down. She didn’t actually have to see it herself. Just hearing about it was enough.
Fatima thinks about the time, when she attended a ballet. She was sitting in the audience like everyone else -- quiet, appreciative, hushed in reverential silence. Suddenly, in the middle of the ballet, there was a racket backstage, followed by the sound of someone obviously falling down. Fatima immediately broke out laughing. She couldn’t help herself. It was just too funny. Rania would have done the same thing. The trouble is, she was the only one to laugh. Everyone else in the audience kept quiet. They probably didn’t see the humour in it. But Fatima did, and so would have Rania.
If you want to get intellectual about it. And who does? Not Fatima, you can recall the essay on humour by the French philosopher, Henri Bergson. According to Bergson, what makes humour funny is the surprise of it. The unexpected. The unanticipated. Under that definition, falling down would qualify perfectly. And when you put that unexpected act, unexpected by both the person doing it and the person witnessing it, in a strictly formal setting -- a ballet performance -- then the unexpected is even more unexpected and “inappropriate” and, therefore, more hilarious. It seems to Fatima that under such circumstances, laughing is perfectly natural, as natural as a fart, even healthy. But not-laughing is artificial and inhibiting. Given the choice between laughter and decorum, Fatima hopes she will always come down on the side of laughter. She will leave decorum to the more mature people. When it comes to laughter and forgetting, however, that’s a different story.