On education

It transpired when I was in a café sipping my coffee waiting for a friend of mine to join me who was uncharacteristically late. So I was just sitting sipping coffee, having a look at people on the other tables. On most tables the conversation was in German so I didn’t pay much attention to that (This is such a euphemism since paying attention would have hardly helped improve comprehension). But there was one table where there were a couple of teenagers speaking English and I was naturally drawn to that. I was not so much interested in what they were talking about as I was in how the body language of the speakers changed and reacted to what they or the other person was saying. I could clearly see that in social contexts, one of the simplest way that people show their approval of what is being said to them or the group at large is to laugh or smile as a reaction. I could see that when people at the table laughed, the speaker got more energy to continue with whatever he or she was saying (because the person had clear approval to continue). It looked to me that the way social groups encourage certain types of behavior is by laughing at things.

Conversely when someone said something that did not make the group laugh or smile, the speaker is subtly discouraged to continue with his or her tirade. Such a speaker may often be considered boring or uninteresting.

Thereby there is at least a small causal relationship between social behavior (body language used, words used, the type of jokes told etc) and what people laugh at. This makes the reason as to what makes people giggle, laugh, grin, smile, and chuckle at the very heart of human behavior. Hence it is important to find what exactly what it is that people laugh at. As per my experience I feel that what people laugh at is associated with the amount and type of knowledge that they have acquired in their lives. That’s why people in Pakistan will laugh at things which people in Germany may consider lame and what people Germany may laugh about is what people in Pakistan can consider immoral. The difference is the amount of education that they have had. The knowledge they have received acquired or information that was generally disseminated to them. So in order to improve social behavior, educate people.

“So I didn’t get stood up after all” I tell him, as he finally shows up
“Da kann nicht seinJ” he says