Voyage to the Center of the Yuk
Next time you’re alone, perhaps reading a somber editorial page, note how often you break into laughter. Compare that with, say, a weekday lunch with office pals. Chances are more laughs erupt at lunch and they have very little to do with jokes. Those are among the intriguing findings of an ongoing serious study of laughter by Robert R. Provine, a neuroscientist who’s turned his inquiries from the windowless laboratory of nerve cells to sunlit malls and other unnatural human habitats.
“Our ignorance of laughter is remarkable,” says Provine, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “It provides cues every bit as interesting and valuable as fossils dug up in Africa.”
Writing in the current Current Directions in Psychological Science, Provine chronicles a variety of counterintuitive findings about one of humanity’s more basic involuntary instincts. The main prerequisite to laughter, he finds, is not a joke but another person. We laugh to communicate pleasure, agreement, attentiveness, amicability, even mating interest.
Male and female laugh patterns are similar until the genders mingle. Then, males laugh less and females laugh significantly more. (Remember the class clown back in school? A male, right?) Whether in personal ads or formal studies, females list “sense of humor” as more important in relationships than do males. They also laugh most among men they find attractive or interesting. Men, in turn, are attracted to women who laugh most in their presence.
Provine uses laughter as an unobtrusive window on human behavior. Although stubborn cadres of grumps survive, laughter is a universal act inherited by everyone, shared by most, controlled by few and understood by even fewer. Like crying, he says, laughter is difficult to produce on command. It is spontaneous, relatively uncensored and comprises an honest emotional signal, one unstudied and taken for granted.
Take tickling, for example. It’s another social, laugh-engendering mechanism and among life’s earliest forms of communication. Through tickling, adults teach infants the pleasure of touch and the pleasing reciprocity of laughter, which carries through life. After childhood, though, the touches and tickles turn into part of the courting game, with laughter as the signal of pleasure and encouragement.
Other mammals such as chimpanzees produce similar laugh-like vocalizations during play, he notes. Is there a connection? Why is human laughter so infectious? How is it infectious?
“What’s more exciting,” Provine asks with a smile, “than searching for the roots of human nature through the principles of laughter?” Not funny, but fun.
