Why Laugh?
Laughter is an emotional
release similar to crying, brought upon by a mild mental stress rather than an
emotional stress. It happens when the mind has some notion of an expectation
and then that expectation is replaced by something similar but different and
unexpected.
From sudden emotion
created by humorous activities performed by others or by themselves.
When they're happy and feeling good.
Sometimes to prevent
crying.
Someone tickled them.
It feels good to laugh.
Laughter is good for our
lungs as an outlet for some extra energy. We use 17 different muscles to smile
and 43 different muscles to frown, so it's easier
to smile than frown.
Laughing also adds days
to our lives. However, crying lessens our lives.
Laughing could also be
bad, because you might get bad luck.
The Humor Code
Why do humans laugh? (Hint: It’s
rarely because something’s funny.)
On Jan. 30, 1962, three schoolgirls
started giggling in a boarding school classroom in the northeastern corner of
what is now Tanzania—and touched off a very strange epidemic. The three couldn’t
stop laughing—and soon the uncontrollable cackles spread to their classmates.
The laughing attacks lasted from a few minutes up to a few hours; one poor girl
reportedly experienced symptoms for 16 straight days. Victims couldn’t focus on
their schoolwork, and would lash out if others tried to restrain them.
When 95 of the school’s 159 pupils
had come down with what came to be known as omuneepo, the Swahili word
for laughing disease, the school shut down. The students returned to their
villages, taking omuneepo with them. The affliction spread from person
to person, school to school, village to village. “The education of the children
is being seriously interfered with and there is considerable fear among the
village communities,” noted local medical officers in a 1963 report in the Central
African Journal of Medicine. They could find no explanation for the matter.
When the epidemic finally died down months later, roughly a thousand people had
been struck by the “laughing disease.”
The laughter of our everyday lives
isn’t for the most part in response to anything resembling jokes.
As part of our effort to understand
what makes people laugh, we traveled to northeastern Tanzania, tracing omuneepo’s
spread across the region more than a half-century ago. We tracked down
teachers, students, and medical experts who experienced the phenomenon
firsthand. We learned there was nothing funny at all about the situation at the
time. The religious boarding school where the laughter began was marked by
strict rules, windowless dorms, and devilishly uncomfortably chairs designed to
promote correct posture. Investigators found similar conditions at other
locations where the omuneepo later erupted: Serious overcrowding, poor
food quality.
“It’s a form of complaint,” Kroeber
Rugliyama, a longtime local psychiatrist said of the mysterious laughter. “They
had no alternative form of expression.”
Laughter is a vexing subject even
when it’s not spreading through the countryside like a virulent disease. Take
the work of Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and psychology professor at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County. For his book, Laughter: A Scientific
Investigation, Provine engaged in what he called
“sidewalk neuroscience,” tracking and observing real-world laughter. He and his
collaborators used tape recorders to capture more than a thousand “laugh
episodes” in bars, shopping malls, cocktail parties, and class reunions. And he
had dozens of student volunteers note in a “laugh log” the circumstances around
every time they tittered, chuckled, or guffawed.
The results were surprising, even to
Provine: Less than 20 percent of the real-world laughter incidents he cataloged
were in response to anything resembling something funny. Far more often, people
were giggling or chuckling at innocuous statements such as “I’ll see you guys
later,” “I see your point,” and “Look, it’s Andre!” What’s more, in all of
these cases, the person who produced the laugh-provoking statement was 46
percent more likely to be the one chuckling than the person listening. And
while laughter might seem like something that can erupt at any point in
response to something funny, in only eight of the 1,200 laugh episodes Provine
cataloged did the laughter interrupt what somebody was saying. Instead, 99.9
percent of the time, laughter occurred in tidy, natural breaks in the
conversation, punctuating the speech like a period or exclamation point.
Laughter is far more than just a
response to humor. It’s a primal human tool, one of the building blocks of
society.
Provine discovered that the laughter
of our everyday lives isn’t for the most part in response to anything
resembling jokes. Instead, most of it occurs in conversations that, out of
context, don’t seem funny at all. Provine’s discoveries suggest that laughter
is inherently social, that at its core it’s a form of communication and not
just a byproduct of finding something funny. Sure enough, when Provine went
through the laugh logs he’d collected, he found his participants were 30 times
more likely to laugh in the presence of others than when they were alone. Among
the few solitary instances of laughter, nearly all occurred in response to TV
shows or other media—that is, electronic proxies for other people. When people
noted in their journals that they were truly alone, they hardly recorded any
laughter at all.
So why would we have evolved the odd
and powerful vocal mannerism of laughter? Why do we have an innate need to
share what we find funny with others, and why can it can resemble an
out-of-control disease?
Evolutionary theory is rife with
possible explanations, but one of the most compelling was put forward in a 2005
Quarterly Review of Biology article by an undergrad named Matthew
Gervais and his adviser, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. It’s based
on the efforts of a quirky 19th-century French physician named Guillaume Duchenne, who went
around zapping people’s faces with electrodes. Luckily for Duchenne, he worked
at an old woman’s hospice, so he had access to a lot of prone bodies. He must
have been quite the charmer. According to articles on Duchenne, all the ladies
wanted to be electrocuted by the “little old man with his mischief box.”
Applying the prongs of his box to
people’s faces, Duchenne evoked one kind of smiling—the voluntary kind, the
type of expression we produce when we a grin to be polite. This mannerism, he
discovered, involves the face’s zygomatic major muscles raising the corners of
the mouth. But Duchenne discovered there was a second variety of smiling and
laughing, one that occurs when we find something truly entertaining or funny.
This expression was more complex, utilizing both the zygomatic major muscles
and the orbicularis oculi muscles that form crow’s feet around your eyes. It’s
why people say a real smile is in the eyes. Duchenne was never able to
reproduce with his electrodes this second form of expression—now known as a
Duchenne smile or Duchenne laughter—and he came to believe it was “only put at
play by the sweet emotion of the soul.”
More than a century later, Gervais
and Wilson saw Duchenne’s discovery as evidence that laughter evolved at two
different points in human development. First, they posited, at a point sometime
between 2 million and 4 million years ago, came Duchenne laughter, the kind
triggered by something funny. An outgrowth of the breathy panting emitted by
primates during play fighting, it likely appeared before the emergence of
language. This sort of laughter was a signal that things at the moment were OK,
that danger was low and basic needs were met, and now was as good a time as any
to explore, to play, to socialize. “What the humor is indexing and the laughter
is signaling is, ‘this is an opportunity for learning,’” Gervais told us. “It
signals this is a non-serious novelty, and recruits others to play and explore
cognitively, emotionally and socially with the implications of this novelty.”
But then, sometime in the hundreds of
thousands of years after that, theorized Gervais and Wilson, the other sort of
laughter emerged—the non-Duchenne sort, the kind that isn’t dependent on
something being funny. As people developed cognitively and behaviorally, they
learned to mimic the spontaneous behavior of laughter to take advantage of its
effects. They couldn’t get it right—they couldn’t simulate the eye-muscle
movements of real laughter and smiling—but it was close. Mimicked laughter was
a way to manipulate others—sometimes for mutually beneficial purposes,
sometimes for more devious reasons. As Gervais and Wilson put it in their
paper, “non-Duchenne laughter came to occur in aggressive, nervous, or
hierarchical contexts, functioning to signal, to appease, to manipulate, to deride,
or to subvert.”
Laughter, in other words, is more than just a response to
humor. It’s a primal human tool, one of the building blocks of society. It taps
into the core of what we are as social creatures, expressing from one person to
another what often cannot be said in any other way: either that everything is
in good fun—or, as in the case of omuneepo, that something is very, very
wrong.
