Once I was in trouble with my dad because I busted a hole in a wall. I was probably about thirteen years old and I had a bit of a temper and so did my dad. In the midst of his yelling at me I burst out laughing at the utter ridiculousness of it all. It was a poor decision. I ended up having to pay to have the hole fixed after trying, and failing, to fix it myself. On that day I promised to never again kick a wall while wearing Crocs because it was obvious that the wall couldn't handle the Croc's majesty.
Another time I was at church and I had cut Sunday school so that I could walk to Taco Bell with my friends. When I got back there was still time left int he service so I decided to fool around with my friends. We went out to the sign leading into the church and we sat on it. Apparently we were distracting passing traffic and the police had to come and remove us from the sign. That is another bad time to start to laugh at the situation you are in. There was no way to explain our sober behavior to the nice police officers though so I was forced to chortle. It was interesting to explain to my parents why they had to pick me up from a security holding location.
Finally, the story you were all waiting for, I was told to sit and wait. This was right after I got a concussion and I was supposed to wait to be checked out. I was sitting and waiting and listening to my coach tell me what I had done wrong to get lit up the way that I did. I just started laughing. I laughed myself off my chair and onto the floor. And that's how you piss off a football coach.
It definitely seems like teenage laughter is an entirely different genre of laughter. It's one of the least inviting forms of laughter, in part because we assume that groups of teenagers are operating under a kind of superiority theory. Laughter can come across sometimes as inviting, but if it isn't inviting it can be actually somewhat menacing, which is no doubt why these folks reacted this way.
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