“Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.”

Pop Quiz: Who first penned the above lines? Well, according to Trivia-Library, it was Helen Wheeler Wilcox who first published the lines in the poem “Solitude” in 1883. It’s an interesting anecdote how the poem came to be written, but it begs the question: Why is this true? Actually – forget the weeping part, let’s just consider the first line.

The always-hilarious Scientific American has a story titled “Why the giggles make us smile” that may lend a clue. A Neuroscientist at University College London observed that people respond to verbal clues around them by subliminally wanting to mimic them. That explains why being around grumpy people will make you grumpy too. We all respond to these nonverbal cues. But what was interesting was that of positive (laughter) and negative (crying) cues, positive ones such as laughter led to stronger positive responses. In other words, we tend to respond to laughter more strongly (is that a word?) than we would to crying.

“With things like laughter, we don’t tend to just have an emotional experience. What you tend to do is, you see somebody laughing and you actually want to join in.”

A quick search on Google yields about a bazillion references to the positive effects of laughter, so there’s no point in beating that horse to death. And anyone who’s visited the Zone for any length of time can probably tell that I enjoy laughter and funny stuff. (Mrs. MZM call me “a funny man”; I have no idea why.) But my question is this: What is it that predisposes someone in one direction or the other?

Is there a “funny” gene in the DNA somewhere, waiting to be discovered and exploited? Just imagine if one day you could “design” your children to be naturally funny and cheerful, and skip the “terrible twos” or those horrible teenage grumps.

Now there’s something that would deserve a Nobel Prize!