A shared universe › Blog › Laughing in grief is allowed too · Español
At many a wake, there comes a moment when someone tells a story about the person who has died and the room lets out a burst of laughter. Afterwards, more than one person feels guilty, as if laughing were disrespectful. Studies of bereavement tell a different story.
In a study published in 1997, the psychologists Dacher Keltner, of the University of California, Berkeley, and George Bonanno analysed interviews with 39 people from the San Francisco area, aged between 21 and 55, who had lost their partner between three and six months earlier. In them they talked about their relationship with the person who had died, and they were recorded on video. The researchers studied the first minutes, gesture by gesture.
They distinguished two kinds of laughter. One is spontaneous, the kind that creases the eyes, which the researchers call Duchenne laughter after the French neurologist who in 1862 described which muscles a sincere smile moves. The other is social laughter, put on out of politeness and not reaching the eyes.
More than half, 21 of the 39 people, laughed genuinely at least once while talking about their dead partner. These people said they felt less anger and less distress than the rest, took a little distance from their pain and remembered their marriage as more harmonious. Nothing of the kind happened with polite laughter.
The researchers then showed the videos, without sound, to groups of students. Faced with those who laughed, the students felt more amusement and less frustration, and saw them as better adjusted to their loss.
But there was one detail that the authors themselves pointed out as an unfortunate effect: the students were more willing to comfort those who did not laugh. Someone who laughs in the middle of grief may seem already to be fine, and receive less support than they need.
That same year, Bonanno and Keltner published another piece of work with a similar group, whom they followed for up to two years after the death. Those who had shown more signs of positive emotions in that interview, above all sincere smiles, had less grief at twenty-five months. Those who had shown more anger on their faces had more grief at fourteen months and, by their own account, poorer health. Sadness on the face, by contrast, was not related to how grief developed: showing it made nothing worse.
It should be read with care. These are studies of fewer than forty people, from almost thirty years ago, and there is no record that they have been repeated as they stood; and the fact that two things go together does not prove that one causes the other. It may be that laughter helps you cope with sorrow, and it may be that those who are already carrying it a little better are the ones who laugh most. What they do make clear is that laughing in the middle of grief is not a sign of bad grief or of little love.
Other studies have seen the same from other angles. The psychologist Susan Folkman, of the University of California, San Francisco, followed over time men who cared for a partner with AIDS and who later lost them. As well as very intense distress, they had good moments throughout the caregiving and the bereavement. The one did not cancel the other.
Dale Lund and his team, at the University of Utah, asked 292 people aged fifty or over who had been widowed between five and twenty-four weeks earlier. Nine in ten said that humour was important in their daily life, and three in four had laughed heartily at something in the previous week. Those who had more moments of humour and joy had less grief and fewer symptoms of depression, although here too it is impossible to know which causes which.
In a 2014 study led by Melanie Booth-Butterfield, with 484 bereaved people, those who tended to use humour coped better with the loss. And those who were very concerned about whether laughing was appropriate, or about what others would say, did worse. Sorrow and laughter are not mutually exclusive: you can miss someone enormously and, on the same afternoon, laugh as you recall something of theirs.
Many laughs in grief have to do with the person who has gone: the way they drove, the phrase they kept repeating, the time they got the wrong wedding. Telling these stories is a way of remembering them as they were, with their quirks and their wit, and not only as they were at the end.
Sometimes, at first, that same humour hurts. In a small Canadian study published in 2024, several people described how a joke or a bit of teasing suddenly brought their sorrow back, because it reminded them how much the person who died had loved jokes. With time, for some, that memory became one of the good ones.
Laughter can come at the worst moment, out of nerves, or others may not understand it. Not everyone is in the same place: someone who has just heard the news may feel hurt by a burst of laughter in the room. If you are supporting someone who is grieving, these ideas help you get it right:
None of this is an obligation. There are days, and sometimes months, when nothing seems funny, and that is normal too. You do not have to force a smile or look on the bright side. Often laughter comes back by itself, in moments, when it finds a gap. And when it comes back, it does not have to bring guilt with it: grief does not come in stages, and one day you laugh and another you cry.
If the months go by and you find no moment of relief, if nothing interests you or you feel you cannot go on, talk to your GP or a professional. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
If you remember something of theirs that still makes you laugh, keep it on a “For someone who is gone” star. Laughter, as explained in Why we laugh more in company, wants others nearby; whoever reads it will keep you company with a line of remembrance.