What are you laughing at?

Main Page | Report this Page

Science Forum Index » Philosophy Forum » What are you laughing at?

Page 1 of 1

Author

Message

Frederick

Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 9:09 pm

Guest

What are you laughing at?

New Scientist vol 180 issue 2426 - 20 December 2003, page 72

We may know what makes us giggle, but understanding why is a more ticklish problem, says Kate
Douglas

'TIS the season to be jolly. But have you ever wondered about laughter? Why do we emit those
strange yelps? What do they mean? And where did tittering come from? I'm not joking - this is
serious.

We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the
humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play.
But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures,
including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don't crack up at Homer
Simpson or titter at the boss's dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place
suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the
way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.

There is no doubt that laughing is a social activity. "Laughter evolved as a signal to others - it
almost disappears when we are alone," says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of
Maryland and author of Laughter: A scientific investigation and the man behind the first research
into what really makes people laugh. Provine found that most laughter comes in polite response to
everyday remarks such as "Must be going", rather than anything remotely funny. The idea that
laughter works as a kind of social glue fits with some other observations. A baby's first giggle
comes at around three or four months, which also happens to be the time the baby starts to
recognise individual faces. And the way we laugh depends on the company we're keeping. Men tend to
laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to
laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even
submission.

In the house of laughter, humour is a recent extension built with the bricks of language. To find
the foundations - the origins of laughter - we need to dig deeper. For Provine, the key lies in
play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more
obvious than in the boisterous antics of rough-and-tumble play. "The original stimulus for laughter
is the tickle, and the original context is play," he says. What's more, this happy combination of
tickle, laugh and play seems to extend way back beyond the origins of our own species. "Tickle a
chimp and it has a characteristic play face and vocalisation," says Provine. That sound is known as
a pant laugh.

Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps
laugh while at play. It seems obvious when you watch their shenanigans - they even have the same
ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a
chimp's characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to
119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was. Some suggested it was a
mechanical noise such as sawing, although nearly a third identified it as an animal panting.

These findings underline the main difference between chimp and human laughter. When we laugh the
sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of ha, ha, has. Chimps
do not have the vocal control to do that, so their laugh is breathy, with one sound produced on
each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same origins as
our own laughter?

New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmermann, head of
the Institute for Zoology at the Hannover School of Veterinary Medicine in Germany, who compared
the sounds made in response to tickling by babies and bonobos during the first year of their life.
Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that
bonobo and human baby laughter follows broadly the same pattern. The main difference lies in the
pitch, which is higher among chimps.

Zimmermann believes the similarity between bonobo and baby laughs supports the idea that laughter
evolved long before humans arrived on the scene. Provine is also convinced. "The chimp pant-pant is
transformed into the human ha-ha," he says. And what started simply as a modification of breathing
associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator
of pleasure. "Laughter is the ritualised panting of rough-and-tumble play," he concludes. "It may
provide the best example of how a specific instinctive vocalisation evolved."

Pinpointing when laughter evolved is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that
lived perhaps 8 million years ago, but animals might have been guffawing way before that. More
distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh and anecdotal evidence suggests that canids
and other social mammals may do too.

Zimmermann and her colleagues are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of
just how widespread laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for
laughter beyond primates comes from research done by Jaak Panksepp from Bowling Green State
University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to
tickling. The common ancestor of rats and humans lived around 75 million years ago.

All this still doesn't answer the question of why we laugh at all. This has been pondered for at
least two millennia by thinkers as weighty as Plato, Galileo and Darwin. One idea is that laughter
and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is
that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling
creatures that might harm us, or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies - such as the
abdomen - that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most ground
in recent years, particularly with evolutionary biologists, is that laughter in response to
tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another.

This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it
goes on too long it can be torture. Indeed, tickling was used as torture in medieval times. The
paradox is that although tickling incapacitates us, we respond with uncontrollable laughter and
facial signals that say, "Keep going, I'm having a good time." By engaging in a bout of tickling,
we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal that we understand
the assault is not for real. The unconscious, involuntary nature of laughter is what makes it a
reliable signal of trust. "Automatic, hard-to-fake displays are a hallmark of evolved honest
signals," says Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.

But is establishing trust between tickler and ticklee really at the root of laughter? "That stuff
could have come later," admits Flamson, "although not much later because we see it in some
non-human primates." Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are inextricably linked. "Rats
chirp a lot when they play," says Panksepp. "These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get
bonded to us as a result - which sure seems like a show of trust."

We'll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn't in
response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably
quite serious, we owe human laughter and our frivolous language-based humour to the same unique
skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the ho, ho,
ho. And that's where we have the last laugh, because without that control there would also be no
speech - and no dreadful jokes to endure.

Kate Douglas

Anti- Corporation

Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 9:09 pm

Guest

"Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall,
have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. It seems obvious when
you watch their shenanigans - they even have the same ticklish spots as
we do."

So why do we fuck-up their environment? Why do we invade their lands,
slaughter them? If they laugh, do they not cry? Just because we do not
uderstand animals, and, hve a diffrent culture, are they really so
different than the fucking niggers injuns chinks or spics? To be
honest, I like real monkeys better. If only I was in command of the
universe? Yeah, get up on that. Monkeys do not want to poison my
environment like the corrupt corporate piece of shit, anyone got a
racial epitet for these motherfuckers? We need a new word, one that has
the impact of 'fucking nigger cunt' but applys to these fucking
assholes.

Speaking of monkeys, wat if whales and seals had civil fucking rights,
what, the 14th amendment doesn't apply to them because they do not speak
th same fucking language? What? with all of our great and glorous
technological advances we still can not communicate with them? I bet if
you were to hack them up into little pieces bit by bit you woud get a
raction yo could understand? But, fuck that ignore it, they are just
like those little fucking niggers you use to beat and have do with your
economically ethical standards of profit and exploitation. And, you
motherfucking pussys who are sub-servient to these
corporate-capitalistic cunt fucking nigger motherfucking assholes, I
call you FAGGOTS, why? because you like the feeling of some
corpo-capitalist faggot fucking you up the ass, only pussy cunts
wouldn't fucking blow these motherfuckers off the face of the planet
with their corrupt bullshit econom-ethical book of fucking crap and lies
of their minmalist understanding just so they can fucking profit and
'legally' rape every other fucking species and man on the planet.

You would think on the world-wide internet their would be more
pissed-off psycho motherfuckers like me? I guess you all are 'one of
them'. So, if monkeys laugh, and cry, but, b mutilating them you can
cure cancer for the fucking rich corpo-caitalists fuck, is it a good
thing? We could kill-off fucking spics and harvest kidneys and
accomplish the same thing, with better economic results for Americans
who must compete with these bastards, and, those in China for jobs? Why
only eat whale blubber, when, we could waste a bunch of motherfuckers on
the border and get all that fat with less ecological impact?

Talk about QUESTIONING your corpo-capitalistic up-bringing. I
envision a utopia if only I was in command, and, guess what, I WOULD BE
LAUGHING MY FUCKIN' ASS OFF THE ENTIRE TIME.

Mark Earnest

Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 9:28 pm

Guest

"Frederick" <mmcneill@fuzzysys.com> wrote in message
news:3FF0DE61.4519C4D9@fuzzysys.com...