You have two weeks left to have a laugh. Specifically, to take nitrous oxide before it becomes illegal, with those who “repeatedly misuse the drug” facing up to two years in prison, and dealers up to 14 years. Let us prepare for the funniest two weeks of our lives, as we remain able, if not obliged, to inhale a modest canister of gas and enjoy its euphoric effect, its ability to reduce anxiety and kill pain. After that, we’re on our own.
The last time I took laughing gas I was being stitched up after giving birth. It was April 2020, and I dragged on the thing so hard I hallucinated. It was fabulous. The midwife and I talked about our favourite hairdresser and ideal lunches and I puffed and puffed like we were in the smoking area out the back of a club, and it was as if the new pandemic was not raging outside and refrigerated shipping containers were not being co-opted to accommodate corpses and everything, actually, was fine. I wasn’t laughing, not really, but the ghost of laughter, a sort of febrile memory of it hovered at the end of the bed.
I used to really, really laugh. I was regularly sent out of the classroom, because I couldn’t stop laughing at something Charlotte, specifically, had said, and while I still chuckle, giggle, grin, that proper piss-yourself laughter where you can’t stop, even if a teacher is leaning over you very sternly, feels increasingly out of reach.
In a New Yorker interview recently, actor/writer/it girl Julia Fox mourned the loss of laughter in her life, since friends had died and she’d had a kid and age had happened. “Before, I’d be laughing all day long. Everything was a joke,” she told Jia Tolentino. “Everything was crouched-down, pee-in-your-pants hilarious and now I probably laugh like that once a year… It makes me really angry.” I shared the interview in a WhatsApp chat and we all glumly agreed (apart from Susie, who had been lucky enough to pull a friend through a window the day before when the door got stuck, but these joys, humiliations and privileges are rare). We all glumly agreed that, due to a combination of eternal childcaring, various griefs, hangovers from the pandemic, distractions both economic and existential, and a lack of time for casual fun, at this point in life a good laugh was hard to find.
People find a way. I’ve seen it. When she needs a laugh, my sister goes to see standup – and I have a handful of comedians I grudgingly admire. But the idea of paying to laugh unfortunately bothers me. It’s dreary of me I know and I don’t want to liken it to sex, I’m doing my very best not to, but doesn’t the commercialisation of either seem to rid it of its most essential quality? And how can it be good, how can it be real, when it’s with a person you don’t even know? I guess, if real life currently feels too dark for humour, I need to get over myself and buy a ticket. Or there are two weeks, of course, to invest in nitrous.
It makes perfect sense that young people are buying laughing gas. Life probably doesn’t seem very funny at the moment. One funny thing about the banning of laughing gas, though, is the reason they’re banning it. Quite against the advice of the UK’s drug advisory panel, who wrote that evidence suggested “the health and social harms of nitrous oxide were not commensurate with such a move”, and that the sanctions that would apply were “disproportionate for the level of harm associated with the drug”, MPs voted overwhelmingly to have it categorised as a class C drug. It can cause nerve damage, but only in people who use a lot of it, regularly – alcohol causes far more damage, to far more people. This is not the reason they’re banning it. The reason they’re banning it is because it’s associated with “flagrant drug taking in our public spaces” and antisocial behaviour. They’re talking about litter. The littering of metal canisters is seen as far more offensive than, for example, a crisp packet or disposable face mask, because of the sinister euphoria it suggests. The brief, wild laughter.
I started the conversation with my partner by accident, by reading out a stat – people start to lose their sense of humour at the age of 23, I read. Hmm, we said quietly, aged almost twice that it makes sense that we might have lost it double. Talking about a lack of laughter to him felt like admitting something awful. But once we’d got the vile vulnerability out of the way and acknowledged the things that were contributing to a kind of occasional numbness, we realised something. We had laughed. And recently, too. The problem, maybe, is that the darkness of the bits between the jokes seems to swallow up the memory of the laughter. I’d just forgotten to pay attention. When I tried, I noticed myself laughing a lot at something stupidly mature our toddler did, and then after successfully wrestling a pillow back in bed. Yesterday, I hooted on the phone to an old pal. Sure, I didn’t piss myself, but it was something. And I hear there’s plenty of that to come.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
