Giggling "Toadsies": Completely Unnecessary Laughter in the Drunken State

        Last week, as I was returning from the library at around 2 am in the morning, I encountered a group of couples returning from Toad’s Place in a drunken stagger. Most couples seemed relatively regular, but for one couple in particular, the female’s only response to any statement made by the male was a five-second giggle. Looking at the situation, there seems to be a simple explanation for the laughter: the girl was affected by increased alcohol levels such that she was only able to respond in this way. However, if we look at a similar situation, in which the subjects are sober, then we can come to the conclusion that the drunken effects are not the only thing fueling the giddy response.

        There is no doubt that the female subject’s actions can be blamed on the alcohol. As humans, we are equipped with the ability to form coherent thoughts and ideas. However, alcohol reduces these effects as it slurs our speech, impairs memory and slows reaction times. Therefore, as a depressant, this socially accepted drug minimizes the ability to decipher between what is funny and what is not. We see this clearly demonstrated in the example above. The drunk female clearly found everything funny; her male companion was simply listing the things he was going to do tomorrow, and she was giggling after every comma.  So this instance of public laughter occurred due to a minimizing of the human mental state, and thus had nothing to do with the girl finding the joke funny.

        Though this situation seems to be fully explained using the logic above, if we ponder a similar, sober situation, we can see that there may be other reasons for this occurrence of laughter. It may be a stereotype that girls laugh at everything guys say, but it is one that I have personally observed to be true at least in several cases. It is not unlikely that this drunk female still was able to perceive her environment, and recognized herself in the presence of a “hot dude”. So in this case, the girl’s laughter represented not only an uninhibited cacophony, but also a deliberate flirting attempt. So because we know that even sober girls often laugh at unfunny statements, we can conclude that this completely unnecessary laughter resulted from the combination of alcohol and a forced response.

        While laughter may indicate an identification of something funny, it is more often than not influenced by other things. In the case of the drunken “Toadsies”, laughter was brought on by both alcoholic inhibition release and a deliberate action to flirt. In today’s world, it is clear that you can no longer rely on the response of laughter to gauge the funniness of a situation; there are just too many outside variables to have a reliable conclusion. So the male in this situation would have been way off track in feeling pretty confident at having amused his lady friend; at most he should have placed his confidence in just being able to support her!