The observation
He enjoys it. He does not do it.
There is no man anywhere who does not like laughing. There are a great many who have not done it in months.
Where this comes from
Twenty years of interviewing, in hotel lobbies and offices and airport bars, on four continents. Thousands of men, most of them at their most composed, all of them being assessed.
What was consistent was not the pressure. It was the absence of the sound. Men who were warm, decent company, entirely likeable, and not once in an hour did any of it come out loud.
Why it is a better test than talking
A man can hold a good conversation with somebody he cannot reach at all. He can be interested, ask the right things, remember the names of the children, and go home having connected with nobody. Talking is a skill and it can be performed.
A laugh out loud cannot. It arrives before you have decided anything about it. That is precisely why it is worth using as the measure: it is the one thing in the exchange you did not choose.
Two things this does not mean
It does not mean be funnier. Nobody here is suggesting you learn material, lighten up, or work on your banter. A man trying to be amusing is further from this than a man sitting quietly.
And a man who cannot remember his last real laugh is not hollow, cold or broken. He is almost certainly just busy, and has been for about fifteen years.
If it is more than that — if nothing has felt like anything for weeks — that belongs with a doctor rather than a website. The safety page says so plainly.
James's own part in it, and the bit he cannot explain
He laughs out loud, often, and says it is not something he arranges. He also gets stared at for it, and he does not know whether the stares are the laughing or something else entirely.
He leaves the question open because he genuinely does not know the answer, and because a man who claimed to know would be selling something. It is not offered as a thing to copy. Nobody can practise their way into it.