play

bonding through sheer silliness

Janet Fish, Monkey Business, 2005

When I was a kid, I would feel melancholy at the end of a party. I hated saying goodbye to my friends. I didn’t want the fun to end. Sleep was a wasteland I had no desire to return to.

The foundation of fun was always some form of make-believe: playing house, fighting in a galactic war, enacting the most dramatic scenes from Little Women. Our collective imagination was a far more interesting and boundless place to hang out than the real world. I remember once when my dad told me to “talk about life” with my cousin, I thought, why would I want to do that? It sounded so boring. These days, 90% of my social time is spent talking about life. 

Much has been written about the changing nature of friendships as we age. With so many priorities competing for their attention, adults stop engaging in unhurried, spontaneous play in favor of “catching up” over dinner scheduled weeks in advance. In her piece in The Atlantic published last August, Rhaina Cohen writes:

For efficiency’s sake, they might pair socializing with other activities, such as sharing a meal or supervising a playdate. Though grabbing dinner with a friend can be engaging, it’s a far cry from elaborate forest ceremonies.

My late twenties was a string of dinner dates. It conveniently allowed me to create boundaries between my life and someone else’s. If the intent of getting together is to catch up over dinner, then once dinner is over, we would go our separate ways. There was safety in this finitude because time had suddenly become the most precious resource. Conditioned by office meetings to think about time in increments of thirty minutes, two hours with a friend seemed like plenty of time to catch up.

Three days ago, I hosted my first dinner party. It feels like something a proper 30-some-year-old should do, and I wanted to bring together people from different parts of my life. It’s not something I do naturally because I’m guilty of defaulting to one-on-one dinner catch ups, but also: my friendships are a reflection of the different facets of my personality, and I tend to compartmentalize my identities. I’m a different shade of myself with my writer friends than I am with my hygge friends or high school friends or Twitter friends. Allowing these parts of me to see each other and interact feels vulnerable. What if they don’t get along?

A dinner party with limited table room stoked some of this anxiety. I wanted everyone to enjoy each other’s company. Sometimes, you know instinctively that someone’s personality would mesh well with others. But it’s not always obvious, and the baseline is higher for a small gathering. With, say, 20+ people, you can have many conversational fire pits going, and if one is extinguished, the party goes on because there are other fires still crackling. The smaller the party, the more important the group chemistry because you’re all gathered around the same fire pit.

After we finished eating and cleared the table, there was very little conversation. We played games. One involved picking up as many candy canes as you can using only a candy cane in your mouth as a hook. When we brought this game to a subsequent New Year’s Eve party, I overheard someone smilingly explain to an uninitiated, “It’s the most undignified game,” and I thought to myself, that’s why it works. You get to see your friends act in a way that you normally wouldn’t, and it’s hilarious, a reminder of what we once were: children engaged in pure fun.

Although the personalities at my dinner table were very different, everyone was comfortable letting loose and being silly. The bonding came not from discovering shared interests and having deep conversations but from laughing together. It’s a much more primal, more childlike form of bonding than the intellectual connections I typically seek at parties. I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in a long time, and it made me realize that through sheer silliness, you can bond with pretty much anyone. It doesn’t matter their age, personality, occupation, education, hobbies. Everyone likes to laugh. When you’re laughing, you’re having fun, and before you know it, it’s three in the morning, and you’ve just spent ten hours together.

We stop engaging in imaginative play as adults not just because our lifestyles change but because we develop inhibitions. We have a reputation to protect, a certain image of ourselves as Serious People To Be Taken Seriously. Anything that undermines that image has no value in our lives. We become less comfortable taking trivial risks that force us to be “undignified” without any practical benefits (enacting an elaborate forest ceremony versus grabbing dinner or attending a yoga class).

Compared to children, adults are inherently “high status,” to borrow Keith Johnstone’s term. They talk about important stuff, about life. When adults play a game where they have to unwrap a gift using oven mitts or pick up candy canes with their mouth, they are lowering their status to comedic effect.

Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more ‘respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children. 

— Keith Johnstone, Impro

We have lost the ability to engage in imaginative play on our own, which is why there are so many card games for adults that involve doing silly dares (swimming like a fish, woofing like a dog). It’s kind of funny if you think about it: we need instructions to be goofy, a manual on how to have the kind of fun that came effortlessly to us as children.