Generous millionaire crazy friend invites you to a private tropical paradisiac island while you’re in the middle of a crisis involving your job and your significant other, who is your job partner. When you arrive on the island, your friend gets kidnapped and you have to rescue him and find out who’s behind it all. In the end, you do that and get a $13M gift from your friend, but then it gets stolen by the guy you made fun of at the beginning.
I take comedies like this and Shotgun Wedding (2022) as a laughing workout, so I don’t pay attention to the ingredients as long as it delivers. They seem to follow a pattern of making you smile throughout the whole movie but with an intensely funny scene around the middle. When we were watching this and we got to the kidnapper’s van scene, I laughed harder than I had laughed in a year. I was aware of my abdominal muscles, and I don’t see how they could have laughed harder. Loes, who in that moment like the purest expression of ROFLing, made me laugh even more.
I’m grateful to people who create this kind of experience. I imagine my ancestors laughing like I laughed yesterday, sitting around a bonfire with cavewoman Jennifer Aniston and caveman Adam Sandler delivering similar stories but only with words.
Connections
- Feedback loops: contagious laughter, mirroring.
- Pattern recognition, stories, videogames: when you see something interesting and fun that you don’t understand, it feels great. Once you understand the mechanics, it losses its appeal, curiosity is gone and it doesn’t feel good, but you’ve actually leveled your brain. Connected to dopamine, anticipation.
- Gratitude.