Psychologist Robert Provine
Image courtesy of TM Ford
Speakers, it turned out, were 46 percent more likely to laugh than listeners—and what they were laughing at, more often than not, wasn’t remotely funny. When Provine and his team of undergrads recorded the ostensible “punch lines” that triggered laughing in ordinary conversation, they found that only about 15 percent could be called humorous. In his book, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, Provine lists some of the laugh-producing quotes: “I’ll see you guys later.” “Put those cigarettes away.” “I hope we all do well.” “It was nice meeting you too.” “We can handle this.” “I see your point.” “I should do that, but I’m too lazy!”
Not So Funny
Previous studies of laughter had assumed that laughing and humor were inextricably linked, but Provine’s early research suggested that the connection was only an occasional one. As his research progressed, Provine began to suspect that laughter was in fact about something else—not humor or gags or incongruity but our social interactions. He found support for this assumption in a study that had already been conducted, one analyzing people’s laughing patterns in social and solitary contexts. “You’re 30 times more likely to laugh when you’re with other people than you are when you’re alone—if you don’t count simulated social environments like laugh tracks on television,” Provine says. Think how rarely you’ll laugh out loud at a funny passage in a book but how quick you’ll be to give a friendly laugh when greeting an old acquaintance. Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch is a response to pain or a shiver to cold. Humor is crafted to exploit a form of instinctive social bonding.
The more technical parts of Provine’s work—exploring the neuromuscular control of laughter and its relationship to the human and chimp respiratory systems—draw on his training at Washington University in St. Louis under Viktor Hamburger and Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini. But the most immediate way to grasp his insights into the evolution of laughter is to watch video footage of his informal fieldwork, which consists of Provine and a cameraman prowling Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, asking people to laugh for the camera.
Typically, Provine asks someone to laugh and they demur, look puzzled for a second, and say something like, “I can’t just laugh.” Then they turn to their friends or family, and the laughter rolls out of them as though it were as natural as breathing. At one point Provine stops two waste-disposal workers driving a golf cart loaded up with trash bags. When they fail to guffaw on cue, Provine asks them why they can’t muster up a chuckle. “Because you’re not funny,” one of them says. Then they turn to each other and share a hearty laugh. “See, you two just made each other laugh,” Provine says. “Yeah, well, we’re coworkers,” one of them replies.
We are not alone in our appetite for laughter. Chimpanzees are also avid laughers—though it sounds more like panting
The insistent focus on laughter patterns has a strange effect on me as Provine runs through the footage. By the time we get to a cluster of high school kids, I’ve stopped hearing their spoken words at all, just the rhythmic peals of laughter breaking out every 10 seconds or so. After one particularly loud outbreak, Provine turns to me and says, “Now, do you think they’re all individually making a conscious decision to laugh?” He shakes his head dismissively. “Of course not. In fact, we’re often not even aware that we’re laughing. We’ve vastly overrated our conscious control of laughter.”
Uncontrollable giggles
The limits of our voluntary power over laughter are most clearly exposed in studies of stroke victims who suffer from a disturbing condition, known as central facial paralysis, that prevents them from voluntarily moving either the left or right side of their face, depending on the location of the neurological damage. When these individuals are asked to smile or laugh on command, they produce lopsided grins: One side of the mouth curls up, the other remains frozen. But when they’re told a joke or they’re tickled, traditional smiles and laughs animate their entire faces.
There is evidence that the physical mechanism of laughter itself is generated in the brain stem, the most ancient region of the nervous system, which is also responsible for fundamental functions like breathing. Sometimes called the reptilian brain because its basic structure dates back to our reptile ancestors, the brain stem is largely devoted to our most primal instincts, far removed from the complex, higher-brain skills that allow us to understand humor. And yet somehow, in this primitive region, we find the urge to laugh.
