I see people having to sit down or lean against the wall when they laugh too hard. It makes my own legs feel like jelly and I definitely need to hold on to something, otherwise I’d just end up sitting/laying on the ground. Why?
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When you are laughing you are pushing up on your lungs using among other your stomach muscles. that is the same muscles which is used to lift your legs when walking. So your other muscles have to compensate in order to keep balance. This can be hard and it is easier if you are able to hold on to something.
As we may have experienced with laughing, especially that uncontrollable kind, it causes us to do weird things. Like you said sometimes makes our legs feel jelly, makes our sides hurt, makes us cry, makes our cheeks hurt, makes us lose our breath, and all sorts of weird feelings.
That kind of laughter is an overwhelming surge of emotions which acts like a tidal wave in our nervous system and causes a few things.
Our breathing changes with laughing so the muscles which help us to normally breath like the ones in our ribs and our diaphragm (the main muscle for breathing) contract a little differently to compensate for all that weird laughing huffing and puffing we do. Our breathing is usually rhythmic and calm, but laughing is not any of that! So our muscles are kind of forcefully pushing air out in an unconventional rhythm we are used to.
Notice how our voice sounds extra high pitch or how usually laughs don’t normally sound like our normal voice sounds? Other muscles in the throat can act weird too without our control.
Our legs feeling like jelly? With that overwhelming response to the nervous system, something called an H reflex can be “disarmed” which helps keep that strong tone in our legs to keep us upright. So when someone says “you’re making me weak!”, they are literally describing the overwhelming response from something funny which is causing their H reflex to go away for a second and causing that weakness in the leg muscles.
The extreme version of this is called Cataplexy. A person with Cataplexia will literally lose muscle control and crumple to the floor when faced with a strong unexpected emotion like laughter.
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