“Do you have a rubber band?” No, it’s not a joke, but it was enough to make someone in a Baltimore shopping mall laugh. It is one of more than 2000 instances of natural laughter recorded by psychologist of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and his team, during their classic 10-year study, the results of which Provine published in his book Laughter: A scientific investigation. Their most striking finding: laughter is more often prompted by banal comments than amusing jokes. That makes it even more mysterious.
Provine thinks laughing began in our pre-human ancestors as a physiological response to tickling (Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol 13, p 215). Modern apes maintain the ancestral “pant-pant” laugh when they are tickled during play, and this evolved into the human “ha-ha”. Then, he argues, as our brains got bigger, laughter acquired a powerful social function – to bond people. Indeed, Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford has found that laughing increases levels of endorphins, our body’s natural opiates, which he believes helps to strengthen social relationships.
“But there’s a big difference between ‘laughing with’ and ‘laughing at’,” Provine notes. Laughing at someone can encourage them to conform socially or it can push them away. There’s also a big difference between natural, “emotional” laughter and conversational, embarrassed, nervous and aggressive laughter, points out at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has analysed these different types. He thinks the latter forms of “forced” laughter probably evolved later, to fine-tune our manipulation of social situations (Quarterly Review of Biology, vol 80, p 395).
Advertisement
So where does humour fit in? It may be playing more of a role than Provine thinks, according to Thomas Flamson at UCLA. He suspects that laugh-inducing comments like the rubber-band question might not seem like jokes to eavesdropping researchers, but many could still be funny to the right person. Such shared in-jokes would boost laughter’s ability to generate camaraderie. Even Provine believes humour is important. He has found that on average, men are funnier than women, and his analysis of personal ads indicates that women generally request humour, while men offer it. This suggests that the ability to make others laugh has evolved at least in part through sexual selection.
Read more: Ten mysteries of you