(In New York City)
If someone laughs, does that mean they are filled with the joy of the Lord?
Not necessarily.
Laughter is not equivalent to the joy of the Lord.
A person may laugh when someone they despise fails. Or when someone does something stupid and hurts themselves. A person may laugh at a sexual joke. Surely such laughter, in cases like these, is not the joy of the Lord.
Finding something funny, at the expense of someone else, is not the joy of the Lord.
The joy of the Lord can sometimes produce laughter. The joy of the Lord can also sometimes produce tears. I have experienced both. I have also experienced the joy of the Lord inwardly, with little outward expression. It's felt like an inner glow, a holy warmth, an existential sweeping gladness.
While the joy of the Lord can manifest in laughter or tears or inwardly, heaven-sent joy transcends all of these. Anyone who has read C. S. Lewis's autobiography Surprised by Joy understands this. For Lewis, the experience of the joy of the Lord had this beyond-earth quality. So much so, that Lewis had to invent a word in his attempt to describe it: Sehnsucht.
Sehnsucht, wrote Lewis, is “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.”
The very feeling of transcendent desire is itself a form of Joy. The longing for the satisfaction is itself a kind of satisfaction.
One excellent book on Lewis and Sehnsucht is Joe Puckett's The Apologetics of Joy. Here's a snippet.
"In his own autobiographical sketch of his journey toward Joy, Lewis explains that, “authentic Joy . . . is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”13 In this way, the Joy Lewis spoke of is not always expressed as a feeling of pleasure. “It might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief.”14 But strangely it is a kind of grief that we want. It is a pain like we feel when we are separated from someone we have loved more than anything or anyone else. For Lewis, we “ache” in desire because we have a sense that there exists a love greater than anything in this world. It is a kind of unhappiness felt like one feels because of homesickness. The difference is that this feeling of homesickness is for a home we have never been to or seen before."
In John 15:11 Jesus says to his disciples, I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.
His joy is deep, right?