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Ha! Ha! Ha! - What’s Funny?
Why Do We Laugh?
By Robert R. Provine
“Funny” is good. We seek and value funny people who bring the gift of guffaws. Funny (or humorous) describes what makes us laugh or causes smiling and amusement. Funny acts range from witticisms and slap-stick comedy to a clown bending over and showing his ass. But to explain our laughter as a response to something funny is to say that we laughed at things that made us laugh. That’s no explanation at all. The perception about what is funny is highly subjective, varies between people and cultures, and is more likely to generate debate than understanding. Consider the great intellects who strained mightily to explain what is funny and produced no consensus. Explanations of laughter and its causes include a response to incongruity (Schopenhauer), disappearance of expectation (Kant), a release of nervous energy (Freud), triumphant celebration (Hobbes), and lack of self-knowledge (Plato). While this literature provides useful insights, it’s mired in a prescientific stage where logic and anecdote, not empirical data, reign. A better approach is to forget everything that we think that we know about what makes things funny and start over by simply observing what causes people to laugh in everyday life. This tactic is so obvious and easy that it’s startling to learn that hardly anyone has done it in over two-thousand years of thinking and writing about humor and laughter. Although some may mourn the neglect of mental life in the present account, as we will see, the intellectual prostheses of observation and the scientific method lead us down paths of discovery beyond the reach of philosophical inquiry, however brilliant its practitioners.
Nothing to joke about
As a starting point to understanding what’s funny in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States, three undergraduate assistants and I surreptitiously observed 1,200 cases of anonymous people laughing in public places, from city sidewalks and shopping malls to the university student union. Whenever we heard laughter, the vocal acknowledgement of a funny event, we noted the gender of the speaker (the person speaking immediately before laughter occurred) and the audience (those listening to the speaker), whether the speaker or the audience laughed, and what the speaker said immediately before the laughter.
At first, we could hardly believe our data. The widely accepted scenario of stand-up comedy, where a deadpan comic tells jokes to a laughing audience, failed to model everyday laughter. Contrary to comedic practice, speakers laughed almost 50% more than their audiences. The study also showed that banal comments like “I’ve got to go now,” or “It was nice meeting you, too”—hardly knee-slappers—are far more likely to precede laughter than jokes. Only 10 to 20% of observed laughter followed anything joke-like. Even the most humorous of the 1,200 comments that preceded laughter weren’t necessarily howlers: “You don’t have to drink, just buy us drinks!” and “Was that before or after I took my clothes off?” are hardly the stuff of great comedy routines. We must rethink the assumption that humor is the basis of most laughter. Something else is going on.
People are funny. The necessary stimulus for laughter is another person, not the cracking of a joke—or, for that matter, a sight gag, comic gesture, or other visual cue. (Plenty of laughter is present in telephone conversations, a purely auditory mode of communication.) This social requirement for laughter was confirmed by a group of my students who kept a diary of the circumstances of their own laughter. After excluding the vicarious social effects of media (television, radio, books, etc.), its social nature was obvious: Laughter was 30 times more frequent in social than solitary situations. The students were much more likely to talk to themselves or even smile than to laugh when alone. However happy we may feel, or funny something seems, laughter is a signal we send to others and it virtually disappears when we lack an audience. Even when watching a comedy video, we are more likely to laugh and rate it as funny when sharing it with a friend.
Speaking in tongues
Laughter is difficult to control consciously, a reminder that we are less in control of our own behavior than we think. Ask a friend to laugh. Most will announce, “I can’t laugh on command,” or something similar. Their observation is accurate and central to understanding the causes of laughter. Laughter, like crying, is hard to fake--efforts to laugh on cue sound forced and artificial. Laughter is a “speaking in tongues” in which we’re moved not by religious fervor but by an unconscious response to social and linguistic cues. Although we are reluctant to accept the fact, in the proper circumstances, laughter “just happens,” and our intellect goes along for the ride, trying to make sense of what’s going on.
Given the automatic, programmed nature of laughter, we should be skeptical of people’s explanations of why something is funny—they don’t know. Personal accounts are only post-hoc attempts to rationalize an irrational, unconsciously controlled, instinctive act. Beware suggestions that someone laughed because they were “nervous,” “embarrassed,” or “someone did something funny,” etc. Laughter is not a choice. We do not decide to laugh as we would select a word in speech, yet literature trying to explain why a joke works typically commits this error of intentionality. Such unfounded ventures into speculation and subjectivism is avoided by focusing on the fact of laughter.
The laughter virus
Laughter is funny. When we hear laughter, we laugh in turn, producing a behavioral chain-reaction of jocularity or ridicule. When we hear laughter, we mindlessly join a primal chorus of ha-ha-ha. Contagious laughter is a compelling display of Homo sapiens, the social mammal. It strips away our veneer of culture and language and further challenges the shaky hypothesis that we are rational creatures in full conscious control of our behavior.
Consider the remarkable 1962 outbreak of laughter in a girls’ boarding school in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). The first symptoms appeared on January 30, when three girls got the giggles and couldn’t stop laughing. The symptoms quickly spread to 95 students, forcing the school to close on March 18. The girls sent home from the school were vectors spreading the epidemic. Related outbreaks occurred in other schools in Central Africa and spread like wildfire, ceasing two-years later, having affected about 1,000 people, mostly girls and women.
Before dismissing the African outbreak as an anomaly, consider our own technologically-triggered, mini-epidemics produced by television laugh tracks. Laugh tracks have accompanied most television sitcoms since an American broadcast on 7:00 P.M. on September 9, 1950. On that evening, “The Hank McCune Show” used the first laugh track to compensate for being filmed without a live audience. The rest is history. Canned laughter may sound artificial, but it makes TV viewers laugh as if they were part of a live theater audience and increases the perceived humorousness of comedy material.
The irresistible pull of other people’s laughter probably has its roots in the neurological mechanism of laugh detection. The fact that laughter is contagious raises the intriguing possibility that humans have an auditory laugh detector—a neural circuit in our brain that responds exclusively to laughter. (Contagious yawning may involve a similar process in the visual domain.) Once triggered, the laugh detector activates a laugh generator, a neural circuit that produces “ha-ha-ha.”
Sexy laughter
In her best-selling book You Just Don’t Understand, linguist Deborah Tannen described gender differences in speech. The gender differences in laughter may be even greater. In our 1,200 cases, we found that while both sexes laughed a lot, females may laugh the most, especially when conversing with males. In contrast, men laugh it up with their male pals but fall strangely silent in the presence of women—in fact, a male speaking to a female was the only gender combination that produced less speaker laughter than audience laughter. In general, women are the leading laughers, while men are the best laugh-getters (funniest). This pattern develops early in life and extends across cultures. Think back to your high-school class clown—most likely it was a guy.
Given the differences in male and female laugh patterns, is laughter a factor in meeting, matching, and mating? I sought an answer in the human marketplace of newspaper personal (lonely hearts) ads. In 3,745 ads placed in eight American newspapers on April 28, 1996, women were more likely to seek out a “sense of humor” while men were more likely to offer it. Clearly, women request funny men who make them laugh, and men are eager to comply with their request. When Karl Grammer and Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt studied conversations between mixed-sex pairs of young German adults meeting for the first time, they noted that the more a woman laughed aloud during these encounters, the greater her self-reported interest in the man she was talking to. In the same vein, men were most interested in women who laughed heartily in their presence. The data from the personal ads and the German conversation study complement my field observation: the laughter of the female, not the male, is the critical index of a positive relationship. Guys can laugh or not, but what matters most is that women get their yuks in. Next time you are at a party, examine female laughter patterns for cues of social and sexual interest in their male conversants. These laugh patterns are predictive because they are largely uncensored--it’s difficult to fake or control laughter.
We chatter and chuckle away, unaware of the messages we send. Women’s desire for funny men may be a veiled request for alpha males, and men’s attraction to women who laugh in their presence may reflect a preference for females who recognize their dominance. Neither men nor women may recognize the role that laughter plays in their lives--laughter is an unappreciated component of charisma.
In many societies, from the Tamil of southern India to the Tzeltal of southeastern Mexico, laughter is self-effacing behavior of both males and females who may use it as an unconscious vocal display of compliance or solidarity with a more dominant group member. Sociologist Rose Coser observed such dominance effects in staff meetings at a psychiatric hospital. Humor was always downward. The department head was a paragon of wittiness, while those of lowest rank laughed along but went jokeless. Patterns of laughter and humor shift with dominance and social circumstance. A corporate CEO may be a stern task-master in the boardroom but a barrel of laughs when cavorting with old school chums. Or an employee who cowers before his boss may become a martinet at home when dealing with his wife and children.
Ticklish relationships
Tickling, the most reliable stimulus for laughter, has the social context necessary for all laughter—you can’t tickle yourself. The neural mechanism for tickle probably evolved from a reflex-like defense reaction that protected our bodies’ surface from external moving stimuli such as predators and parasites. Imagine brushing away a spider crawling up your neck. Beyond its defensive origins, tickling is yet another social context for laughter. Tickling is communication. One of my surveys indicated that people tickle and are tickled by friends, family, and lovers, and that the rationale given most often for tickling someone was to show affection. When have you tickled or been tickled by a stranger? Charles Darwin noted this relational aspect of tickle but over-reached when went on to suggest that humor somehow involved a tickling of the mind.
Why is tickle fun? Tickle battles, the most benign form of human conflict, bind us together in a laugh-filled give-and-take. The ticklee may push away the tickler’s hand and, if necessary, run away, only to return, renew the interaction, and perhaps reciprocate with a tickle counterattack. For infants who can’t yet talk, tickling, along with the associated laughter, is an entrée into social relationships. (Laughter develops about four months after birth.) Laughter signals “I like it; do it again!” while fussing signals that the tickle game has gone too far. Tickling games persist into adulthood as the rough-and-tumble of parents with children and sex play with other adults. Except in the case of children, you are overwhelmingly likely to tickle and be tickled by someone of the opposite sex.
Tickle should not be a footnote in the story of laughter—it’s at the very heart of it. Laughter resolves the ambiguity of rough-and-tumble, signaling that your motive is play, not physical attack. Laughter remains a play vocalization that defuses potential conflict even during such non-physical encounters as conversation. On another level, tickle explains the sound of laughter.
Chimpanzee laughter and paleohumorology
Chimpanzees and other great apes produce a laugh-like sound when tickled or during play, a fact noted by Charles Darwin in his Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). But in telling details, chimp laughter differs from that of humans. Laughing humans chop an outward breath into a series of short (1/15 second), vowel-like blasts (“ha,” “ho,” “he”) that repeat about every 1/5 second. Chimpanzee laughter, in contrast, is a breathy panting, with one pant per inward and outward breath. (As a fellow primate, pant rapidly and you can imitate this sound and its means of production.) This breathy chimpanzee huffing and puffing mimics the labored breathing of vigorous play. Laughter is literally the sound of play. During evolution, the ancestral chimpanzee “pant-pant” was transformed into the human “ha-ha,” a symbolic play vocalization one step removed from its breathy roots.
Chimpanzees are exuberant laughers, panting away during rough-and-tumble, and during chasing games, where, as with human children, the individual being chased laughs the most. But chimps probably don’t have a human-like sense of humor where intentionally jokey behavior triggers laughter without physical contact. Chimps communicating with human caregivers using American Sign Language provide a few instances of symbolic play, purposely misnaming or misusing an object as do young human children. Researcher Roger Fouts observed chimp Moja using American Sign Language to call a purse a “shoe,” then putting the purse on her foot and wearing it as a shoe, and chimp Washoe used a toothbrush as if it were a hairbrush. In no case, however, did such behavior trigger chimp laughter, the gold standard for human humor. I conclude with my own candidate for the Mother of All Jokes, the feigned tickle of the Tickle Monster or “I’m going to get you” game played with human children. (Tickle itself is too reflex-like to qualify as humor.) This ancient ruse is the only joke that you can tell a chimpanzee, and it’s guaranteed to trigger an appreciative, breathy laugh.
Robert R. Provine, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA, is author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (Faber and Faber, 2000).
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