Year end CWT retrospective episode with Jeff Holmes

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  In this episode we look back on the year in CWT podcast space, excerpt:

HOLMES: Yes. All right. Next question from Jumfrey Tuckins: “When was the last time you had uncontrollable laughter, and what caused it?”

COWEN: Probably the correct answer is never. Literally never in my life.

HOLMES: Aw, Tyler.

COWEN: Why should it be uncontrollable? Things just aren’t that funny. How good can something taste? Take the best sushi I’ve ever had, which was quite good. Things can taste a bit better than that, but not much. Funniness is a maximum. It does not bring me to uncontrollable laughter. That’s just the equilibrium.

HOLMES: This is consistent with how you presented yourself before, where you’ve talked about how you feel like you don’t have the extreme highs and lows of other people. You’re much more of a steady middle kind of person. Either displeasureor pleasure, you don’t get the extremes as much.

COWEN: Isn’t uncontrollable laughter in some ways a kind of displeasure? I don’t know, since I’ve never had it.

HOLMES: In the sense that sometimes, if you get tickled, sometimes you’re laughing, but you want it to stop.

COWEN: Right.

HOLMES: No, I think what that’s getting at is those times where something has just so metaphorically tickled you that you — usually, it’s with another person.

COWEN: Not going to happen. Sorry.

HOLMES: That makes me a little sad.

COWEN: Maybe just you’re not funny enough. Have you considered that?

HOLMES: Oh, shots fired, Tyler. Oh, my gosh.

COWEN: I don’t mean you, but you, collective humanity.

HOLMES: Okay, collective you. All right.

COWEN: I heard Louis C.K. live, which is the funniest show I’ve ever heard. I laughed quite a bit, but I was not close to uncontrollably laughing.

HOLMES: Do you have any theory as to why that is? When that happens, again, there’s something that you and another person are experiencing together, that you’ve realized you’ve had the same thought or same experience, and it’s just —

COWEN: I suspect it’s heritable, with apologies to Alison Gopnik.

Rrecommended, and of course this year there will be much more to come.