“Laughter”

“Pealing laughter draws crowds. In a moment, four or five other guests came over to inquire the cause of all this jocularity. (It is a universal human trait to feel an imperative need to know what has made other people laugh, as if life is normally so boring that humor, like a precious gem, must be searched out wherever one suspects it might be found.) I myself was now laughing hard, mainly at the delight of Irv and Erma, and none of us could, for a few seconds, gain enough composure to explain the joke. For some reason related to the phenomenon of infectiousness, this inability proved amusing to the new arrivals and they began to chuckle, in turn drawing several more couples over.”