Bing

 

(Note, for the purpose of this narration, A, B, C, and D are four friends, whose identities are kept secret in order to 'protect their privacy' (read self-respect).

 

Sometimes in life, people have this thing in the body triggered, and all vigilance of dignity are forgotten and they reduce to laughter, insane, uncontrollable laughter. Not a mere sudden flicker of smile, a fifteen on the equivalent of the Richter scale for laughter. Guts feel as if they are being wrenched inside out and one really wonders why the lungs are not exploding…

They say laughter is the best medicine. Maybe people are getting an overdose. Every day, when I head over to school, early morning. While I am worrying about half - finished geography homework, there is the laughter club howling in the middle of the park. Once upon a time, there used to be hordes of people gathered there, now the people have dwindled to about fifteen. I cannot control the chortle that escapes me as I go past them (I do not even try to). Not because of the dwindled numbers, but because the people there are howling, cackling, tittering and giggling as loudly as their bodies can permit. And they are also flailing their arms all the time. THAT is good for the health.

Atleast some scientific studies says so. Studies that do not take into account extremely perverted people that laugh when they see someone slipping. Or someone gets his Parker filched. Or someone gets bowled out when aiming for a six in cricket (No, D, that is not from personal experience). Or a dog howls at a car that came too close for comfort. And these same people simply refuse to understand the simplest of jokes, and invariably ask 'what happens next' after the climax of every (meant to be funny) narration. But they bend over laughing if you say 'bing'. And they laugh at you again if you ask what it means. A and B used to drag themselves early morning to the laughter club, and stopped after ten days. Maybe they had too much to laugh (I used to play cricket then). Maybe they found the early mornings disheartening. Whatever the reason, they quit. C and D laughed at them for quitting…

A and B get the joke… sometimes. C and D do not, no matter how many times it is explained to them. The annoying 'what happens next' question was asked after I told them all about a person who sees two headlights of a lorry and drives his motorbike between the two thinking they are two scooters going side by side… And this behavior of C and D makes A and B (and me) laugh. After this happened a couple of times, C and D understood when a joke was in the air by the inflection in the speaker's tongue, and they laughed, even though they didn't quite get the joke. This they do either from courtesy or to prevent themselves being looked upon as idiots. And then they laugh again in the (very rare) eventuality of understanding the joke. This culture seems to be spreading everywhere and making a huge mockery of the talent they call 'sense of humour'…

Bing.