Why it’s funnier when you’re not allowed to laugh

I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder than during a church service, when something faintly ridiculous caught my eye. My friend saw it too, and once she started laughing, it became impossible to stop. Years later I’ve tried to explain what was so hilarious, but it seems you had to be there. What was it about the combination of the situation – sometimes referred to as “church giggles” – and shared laughter that made it so funny?

Most people recognise the experience. A solemn setting. Absolute silence. A fleeting visual detail that is, in any other context, only mildly amusing at best. Yet the harder you try to suppress the laugh, the more uncontrollable it becomes. When someone else notices it too, restraint becomes next to impossible.

This kind of laughter that comes from trying not to laugh isn’t confined to religious spaces. It happens in any setting where silence, seriousness and self-control are tightly enforced and uncontrolled laughter is frowned upon.

Rather than being bad manners or a lack of emotional maturity, it tells us something about how the brain behaves under pressure. The science behind it is surprisingly complex.

In highly formal settings – churches, courtrooms, funerals – the brain operates in a state of active inhibition. This is the process by which your brain deliberately suppresses brain activity.

The region most involved is the prefrontal cortex, the thinking and decision-making part at the front of your brain, particularly its medial and lateral areas. These areas handle social judgment, behavioural restraint and emotional regulation.

This part of the brain doesn’t stop emotions from arising. Instead, it works by suppressing their outward expression.

Laughter comes from a distributed network in the brain rather than a single “laughter centre”. The impulse begins in the outer regions of the brain, but the emotional drive comes from deeper structures in the limbic system, the emotional processing centre of the brain.

The limbic system includes the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that processes emotions and assigns emotional importance to things, and the hypothalamus, which controls automatic body functions like heart rate and breathing. Once laughter gets released, circuits in the brainstem – the base of the brain that connects to the spinal cord – take over and coordinate facial expression, breathing and vocalisation.

This makes laughter difficult to stop voluntarily. The prefrontal cortex normally keeps this response in check, suppressing laughter when it’s socially inappropriate.

When that control weakens – through heightened arousal or shared social cues – laughter emerges as an automatic, reflex-like behaviour. It’s no longer a deliberate act.

In other words, the impulse to laugh and the effort to stop yourself come from different parts of the brain. They’re competing with each other.

When something unexpected or odd catches your eye, your emotional response fires rapidly and automatically. The process to control it takes effort, burns energy, and is prone to failure, especially when you have to maintain it for long periods.

The more firmly you try to exert control, the more the trigger stays active in your attention. Suppression doesn’t erase the thought – it actually rehearses and sustains it.

Laughter isn’t just a response to humour. Neurologically, it also functions as a regulatory reflex – a way of releasing emotional and physical tension.

In constrained environments, your nervous system has few outlets. You can’t move, you can’t speak, you can’t shift position much or signal discomfort.

At the same time, your automatic nervous system becomes slightly activated. Your heart rate increases, your breathing becomes shallower and your muscle tone rises.

This combination lowers the threshold for emotional release. Your body becomes primed to let something out.

Once laughter begins, it recruits automatic motor pathways in the brainstem that you can’t easily interrupt. This is why laughter, once triggered, often feels physically unstoppable.

You’re no longer “deciding” to laugh. The system has taken over and you’re helpless.

The contagion takes hold

For many people, the tipping point isn’t the original trigger. It’s the instant someone else notices it as well.

This is where social neurobiology comes into play. Humans are highly sensitive to subtle social cues: facial tension, changes in breathing, suppressed smiles.

We process these cues rapidly through networks involving the superior temporal sulcus, a groove along the side of the brain that plays a key role in reading other people. Mirror neurons – brain cells that fire both when we act and when we watch others act – also help us pick up on these signals.

Laughing together represents a shared emotional alignment. That shared recognition does two things at once.

It validates your own response (I’m not imagining this). And it removes the sense of solitary transgression (you’re no longer suppressing alone).

The prefrontal control system weakens further. Laughter spreads through emotional contagion.

By this point, the original trigger hardly matters. What you’re laughing at is each other, and the absurdity of trying to regain control.

These moments are often triggered by something visual, but they don’t have to be. A mispronounced word or an unexpected phrase can provoke the same response.

However, visual triggers are especially potent in silent settings. They can’t be interrupted or talked away, and your brain can replay them repeatedly while suppression is in place.

Spoken triggers, by contrast, tend to be shared instantly. Whether laughter erupts depends on how quickly social inhibition can be re-established.

“Inappropriate” laughter is often framed as rudeness or childishness. But from a neurological perspective, it’s a predictable consequence of prolonged emotional suppression in a social species.

The brain is not designed for sustained inhibition without release. When restraint is tight enough – and when someone else is there with you – laughter becomes the escape route. That is why it feels impossible to stop.

Michelle Spear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.