Back home in Juneau, AK I have a group …show more content…
In Alaska, traveling for sporting events is a weekend event, and everywhere we go we have to get housed out by local swimmer families for the weekend. For our first high school swim meet ever, we traveled to a small town called Craig. The population of Craig is only 1,000 people so you can imagine that this was not an average weekend trip. All of the girls on the team were housed together in one house, and we were staying in the game room. In Alaska, “game room” means something a lot different than is known to people in urban areas, and this game room was where their hunting trophies lived. For 4 days we slept in the same room as bear hides, moose heads, deer antlers and a stuffed dahl sheep. One night, I fell asleep on the couch and Erika and our other friend Hannah decided that it would be a great practical joke to wake me up with the bear hide. You can imagine how the rest of that went. As I woke up being scratched by bear claws, I didn’t think anything was funny. I was freaked out and worried that they would ruin the hide. After the initial 10 seconds of shock, what kind of person would I be if I didn’t laugh at that? Of course I laughed, and to this day we still bring up that memory as one of our favorite memories of high school …show more content…
“One should learn to smile through adversity, laugh to relieve tension, joke with subordinates at work, and so on. With a sense of humor people will enjoy better bodily and psychological health, relationships will run more smoothly and business will be more productive. In this image, humor offers many important possibilities for making the world a positively better place.” (Billigs) I’m sure that when each of us thinks of malicious laughter, we think of the mean cheerleaders in movies, the jocks that haze freshmen and then laugh about it, and a friend making fun of their other friends just to try to fit in; all of these instances do exist, but is it fair to place humor and laughter as the key component of these awful parts of adolescence? “The argument connects humor with discipline and, hence, with power. Even the macro-dynamics of power are involved when parents joke with children.” Yes, power is an element of the negative side of laughter, but so are malicious people. As we stay in statistics, correlation does not equal