Late reaction with laughing?

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You have a late reaction when you find something funny to laugh? I sometimes laugh like 4-5 secons later, whenever it happens it's usually when i'm concentrating or thinking about something else.

Yes, I do too. I have been accused of being slow on the uptake because of this. I get the joke maybe a second or two after everyone else so my reaction can be delayed but sometimes I am processing information about other things that have happened before the joke was told. I do this while reading too. I'll recognise something as humorous but read on and have a chuckle several seconds later.

Most of the time, I don't even laugh. I remember that my whole class would laugh really hard, and I would sit wondering what was funny. People tell me I don't respond to facial expressions in a group. With most people, they mimic the group's but my face often stays flat. I just can't connect that way. I'll only laugh if I think its funny not when the everyone else is laughing.

You know sometimes when two people say the same thing at the exact same time? Well, when that happens to me, we both THINK it at the same time (at least, I assume that's what happens), but I take longer to put it into words, so it sounds like I just repeated what they said.

Saturday Night Live once had a skit about this. In the skit, Mike Meyers was always just a beat or two behind everybody else and they looked at him funny when he finally did react. So he made a time machine and whenever somebody said something funny, he'd hop in the time machine so he could go back 1 minute in time and react at the same time as everybody else.

I'm always a few seconds late to laugh in group settings. The conscious part of my mind goes off on internal tangents based on things said previously. I can't easily keep my concentration fixed on the current speaker.

The phenomenon where a group of NT's all laugh in unison, similar to a sitcom laugh track, always struck me as bizarre. Until I realized that they don't necessarily all get the joke at the same time but merely laugh on cue in order to be part of the group dynamic.