The Corgi Flop

Here I am trying to think of a time when I was caught in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Trying to remember long, winding stories or disastrous tales, I remembered the most recent thing that has made me laugh until I cry: corgis.

My friend Kelli shows dogs (and won Westminster, gotta brag on her), so the topic of types of dogs comes up often. Somehow we began talking about corgis and we ran across this video on YouTube.

Because the video does not allow embedding, here is the gist of it:

What makes this simple video so funny? Is it how long the corgi thinks before he decides it's worth it to jump? Is it how surprisingly high he jumps? Is it how the corgi flattens his entire body to achieve the most aerodynamic shape? Or is it the fact that he's wearing a life vest?

All of the above, in my opinion. The shape of corgis already makes me laugh, but when you add them belly-flopping into a lake, I just lose it.

As uncontrollable fits of laughter go, every subsequent corgi video we watched grew funnier and funnier until we could no longer breathe, just silently laughing and crying on the floor together. Why is it that once one person starts laughing, others just join in? Humans feel empathy. We not only share in the losses and heartbreaks suffered by others, but also in their joys and triumphs.

In fact, one of my favorite things is laughing with friends for no reason. It happens more than I expected, and once I started looking for it, I found it happening quite often. Sometimes you don't need a specific trigger, joke, or theory of humor to make you laugh - you laugh because you are one with the people around you.

What I do know for sure is that it was not the superiority theory, the incongruity theory, or a cognitive shift that made us laugh at the corgis. Some things are simply funny. Isn't that enough?