Out of Breath (both low and high)

“You don’t stop laughing because you grow older. You grow older because you stop laughing” -Maurice Chevalier. I believe that life without laughter is a painful life. I take humor with me everywhere I go. I often incorporate laughter into my daily activities and I always have a good day because of it. I believe laughter is crucial to being happy and I believe happiness is the true meaning of life. Without laughter, I wouldn’t be living life.

I often use laughter as my way of making friends. I feel as if it’s too awkward being around someone that doesn’t laugh with me. It’s a weird feeling because, in order to make myself content, I need to make others laugh. I always laugh with my friends and family but I even laugh with my teachers too. I feel like ever since I started talking to my teachers in a more relaxed way, I’ve gotten more comfortable asking them questions which in return has improved my grades.

I often joke around a lot with my music teacher. I and everyone else in the class always seem to have a powerful laughing fit at least once a week in their class. I have a couple of good stories to tell too. For context, our teacher was teaching us this song to sing and the intro bit was being sung solo by one of my classmates, and our teacher was giving him pointers. He tried to explain in the best way possible how to make his voice sound like the guy in the music video and basically said, “you have to be really breathy”. His demonstration on its own was hilarious as he sounded like he was trying to cough up a hairball as he sang, “Iahhh Hhheard thehhaerehh wahhasss ahh sehhchreehht chohhord”. The classmate still didn’t quite understand what he was talking about probably because he had a hairball in his throat but he tried his best.

A couple of days later we were singing the same song and yet again our teacher spoke up to the one doing the solo explaining he still isn’t breathy enough. Not understanding what he wanted, the student asked, “how breathy can I be?!”. This was where all hell broke loose because our teacher then proceeded to say, “you need to breathe higher” If you knew much about music you’d probably understand that there’s no real way of breathing “higher”. We all started laughing at the suggestion from our teacher and it eventually died down and we started from the top and went to sing the song again.

To our surprise, we couldn’t seem to make it past the first 2 words of the song without breaking down laughing. Every time we got to the solo we were all reminded of the phrase, “breathe higher” and we lost it. Even though it wasn’t that funny we just couldn’t seem to stop laughing or even continue with the song. It got so bad that the nurse who was one room over came to check on us because we hadn’t stopped laughing in 30 minutes.

My favorite part was turning over towards the teacher and seeing him bounce up and down with the same uncontrollable laughter we were having and it made me realize that laughter wasn’t restricted to just children. It seems that the hysterical giggles never really make it past 18 so seeing my 50-year-old something teacher giggling uncontrollably made me realize even more how important laughing is in our life.

“Laughter” by jeffhall2069 is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

“Choir” by PiNe87 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

“Jayantii Laughing” by premasagar is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0