A true story about laughter

My friend Roi from back home in Israel is a pretty man with Indian skin, fine stubble and long eyelashes, whose laugh manages to be the most contagious one I’ve ever encountered despite being one of those silent laughs; he drafts every muscle of his body in on the act but emits no sounds. My friendship with Roi was never the tightest, we’d easily go for months without speaking a word to each other, but it remains my oldest friendship; it began in the first grade and has since withstood twenty years and any of life’s obstacles.

All throughout elementary school and highschool I was decidedly unpopular. Roi, on the other hand, tall, handsome and genuinely interested in the ever popular Israeli youth movements and pre-military activities, found a comfortable place in any social circle. Amongst the more popular crowd I and a few others were known as “Roi’s weird friends”. There was no malice intended in this title, and we were proud and happy to have overheard it. Roi was proud of us as well.

At the age of twelve Roi went through a period of awkwardness and change, and elected to spend the majority of his time with us. We were a haven of late bloomers, a bunch of stumbling preadolescents who never judged. It was during that time that Roi came up with an appropriately weird concept that both he and I found brilliant: we would walk up to classmates during recess and tell them a joke that made no sense, a joke that only bore superficial structural semblance to an actual joke but in reality was nothing but disjointed babble. We would crack up, seemingly uncontrollably, as we told our non-joke and, after the supposed punch-line, we would burst out in aching laughter, which would only intensify at the sight of our audience laughing with us for no reason at all.

The jokes were improvised, and we’d take turns in delivering them, though he had mastered this strange art in a way that I couldn’t have hoped to at age twelve. His laughter was sensational, and he would have kids hugging their rib cages before the joke was half told. Even though the jokes were short and punchy, he would draw them out with his laughter. “A man walks in to a pet shop,” he would start, and already pause at this point, nearly in tears, for a good ten seconds or so. “He says to the owner, do you have any electric guitars?” Another pause, a bigger laugh, side-splitting tear-squeezing contagious laughter, “And the owner says, ‘no, but I have some avocado in the back room!” Wrapping it up, he would have everyone on the floor.

Not that he minded if they didn’t laugh; he actually preferred it. It happened once or twice that a couple of girls barely cracked a smile. They stared at us in earnest confusion as we laughed our asses off, slapped our knees and punched each other on the arm. “I don’t get it.” They’d say.

Roi laughed a lot, more than anyone I knew, but he was also the saddest person I knew growing up. He was almost as sad as I was. That was one of the reasons he was my childhood hero. I occasionally caught glimpses of him as a martyr, and those moments impressed me. Roi turned thirteen six months before I did. On the day of his Bar Mitzvah he said to me “We’re not thirteen. You’re not thirteen.”
I said “I know I’m not thirteen, I’m still twelve.”
“No, no,” He said. “You’re not twelve and you’re not thirteen. You’re at least fifteen. Maybe even sixteen.”
“No I’m not.” I said. “I’m twelve. Maybe even eleven.”
“No. We’re not twelve and we’re not thirteen.”
I was years away from understanding what Roi was talking about, so it’s hard to tell whether he was wrong or right about that one. He was right about the laughter, though, of that I have no doubt.