Michelle Spear in The Conversation:
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.
More here.
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