I was listening to the brilliant Yes Also podcast recently and they had an improviser on talking about the science of banter. By which I mean, the science of making your friends laugh.

There is something really special about having a group of friends that will support and elevate your silly ideas. This is not a phenomenon reserved uniquely for improvisers either - in most friendship groups we find a free-wheeling shared sense of humour that means we laugh longest and hardest with the people we know the best.

Apparently, scientifically it is known as shared fictionalisation - being able to sit in a situation completely untethered from reality and still all wordlessly agree that it is true.

Sound familiar?

Here’s an example from my university days. I lived in rented accommodation with my friends and we didn’t have a lot of belongings. For instance, we didn’t have a sofa. We had a collection of cushions and blankets spread against a wall that we had dubbed the comfort zone.

That name was inaccurate.

We had very little of anything really - cutlery, crockery, chairs, tables - but there was one item of which we had a MASSIVE surplus.

Cheese graters.

We had loads of cheese graters. Graters of every type, shape and gradient. We arranged them in descending order of size on our window sill in the kitchen. Conservatively, I’d say we had ten of them.

And our shared fictionalisation was that any time we needed to grate some cheese, we would come out of the kitchen and yell to the rest of the house:

Does anyone know if we have a cheese grater?

To which someone would inevitably reply from their room:

Have you looked on the window sill?

That was it. WHAT A GREAT JOKE!

It made me so happy every time someone did it.

We knew we had more cheese graters than anyone alive. And still we asked the question.

Scientifically, you can divide a person’s willingness to engage in shared fictionalisation into five levels.

Level One Ignoring the joke or shutting it down completely

I don’t have time for this, I’ve got an essay to write, Chris.

Level Two Answering at face value