We Laugh

We laugh with friends. We laugh at others: the retarded, the deformed, the impoverished, and people of another race, religion, or nationality. At our most humble (or most pretentious) moment, we perhaps even laugh at ourselves. We sneer, scorn, and scoff. We grin, giggle, and guffaw. Comedy reveals a deeper meaning, yet we often find comedy in the meaningless. We find infinite shades of irony, sarcasm, and satire in the infinite varieties of human experience. Why do we laugh?

We laugh *with*.

In this essay, I will show how laughter and humour are essential to social interaction, and vice versa, that social interaction is crucial for laughter and humour. We are laughing beings, and we are social animals. The study of laughter and humour in its proper social context better reflects who we are, and how we interact with each other.

Writers have variously described laughter as “seizure”, “contortion”, “paroxysm of delight”, or worse. Laughter is a physical act. But why do we universally go “hahaha”, “bwahaha”, “muhahaha”, rather than “bababa”, “hagaga”, or “mudadada”? To see the biological root of laughter, we can compare our own laughter to that of our next evolutionary kins. As Darwin and other primatologists have observed, young Chimps and young Orangs when tickled grin and make a chuckling sound. Their “chuckling” is a kind of rhythmic panting, reminiscent of the panting observed when chimps are engaged in rough and tumble (or sexual) play. Provine argues that the root of laughter is in the panting of play, from which laughter acquires its social significance. Laughter becomes a symbol, a gesture, to signal play. And in human, the primitive panting becomes the semi-linguistic “ha-ha-ha”, “he-he-he”, or “ho-ho-ho”. (Provine, ch-5) [1]

The above overview of laughter’s biological origin as panting is suggestive, but relating laughter to the full richness of humour is much more tenuous. The first link of laughter to social relationship can be seen in tickling, an ancient response we share with apes, and probably other mammals. The puzzle that readily comes to mind is why can’t we tickle ourselves? The answer, unbelievably, has to do with parasites and similar nuisances. The first thing to notice is that the response to tickling is a defensive avoidance. When tickled, a person attempts to withdraw the tickled body part. This suggests that the response to tickling and itch are similar– one seeks to end the irritation. Secondly, the body regions most sensitive to tickling (erogenous zones, underarm, waist, ribs, foot…) are those most vulnerable to parasites and aggressors. The most ticklish parts are also the most vigorously defended. These two observation suggests that tickling is closely related to itching caused by (perhaps threatening) external tactile stimulation.

The body needs a way to detect a foreign object crawling up one’s neck, and activate the sensorimotor mechanism to remove the object. This implies a mechanism to distinguish between tactile stimulation originating from some external source (e.g. a scorpion) or from oneself. It is appropriate to freak out when a scorpion is crawling up my leg, but not when I am touching my own leg. Here we have the answer why it’s impossible to tickle oneself. It is because any stimulation originating from the self does not activate the body’s defensive mechanism. There is a self/nonself detector to discriminate between self/nonself stimulation. This conclusion sounds like another “just so” story, but the claim supported by several studies. One such study is of a tickling machine controlled by the subject with a joystick. If the tickling movement of the machine is synchronized with the joystick movement, then there’s no tickling sensation in the subject. If the tickling movement is dissociated from the joystick control, then there’s is tickling sensation. In fact, the greater the dissociation, the stronger the tickling sensation. It is argued that the synchrony of motor control and sensory feedback cancel each other out, thus inhibiting the tickling sensation. Provine argues that tickling is the root of all social play (possibly through grooming). Tickling as social play triggers laughter. Tickling, then, is the most primitive form of “humour” that takes laughter as a social signal, beyond its origin as the natural consequence of rough and tumble physical play (panting).

Zip forward a few evolutionary leaps, we will now consider the social role of humour in human interaction, and how it works in communication. Before delving into our investigation, we should first disambiguate the words “laughter” and “humour”, as many theories conflates the two. “Laughter” is that physical response when we go “ha-ha-ha”. “Humour” is what we do that tends to trigger laughter. In particular, it is perfectly possible to laugh when nothing is humourous. And humour is very sensitive to its context for its effectiveness in provoking laughter. One would be hard-pressed to amuse the court martial with humour. We will first see laughter as a semi-voluntary response in social interaction to enhance social bond, then we will see humour as a more developed sense of play to provoke laughter and establish social relationship.

Laughter, like smile, is semi-voluntary. We have some degree of control, and can force ourselves to laugh. But in general we laugh spontaneously. Laughter, however, does not occur arbitrarily in a conversation. As other extra-linguistic cues like gesture and intonation, laughter is well integrated into the structure of speech. The most notable constraint is that laughter almost always follow a complete statement or question. Provine documents 1200 laugh episodes, all but 8 conform to this constraint. As a rule, we see, “How are you doing? hahaha”, and almost never, “How are you hahaha doing?” (Provine p37) Laughter follows speech structure in that there is a strong tendency for it to fit in the punctuation between utterances. This compare nicely with McNeill’s study of hand gestures. McNeill notes that gestures do not occur arbitrarily, but are formed in synchrony with speech. In particular, a type of gesture McNeill calls the “beat”, which is used to mark “the word or phrase it accompanies as being significant, not for its own semantic content, but for its discourse-pragmatic content.” (McNeill p15-16) A beat is interesting in that the gesture is the same across particular utterances. A small up and down movement like the waving of a baton. It is a metalinguistic marker that signals the special role of an utterance, rather than an extralinguistic signal that augment the actual content of an utterance. In this sense, laughter is similar. Laughter marks the special social role of an utterance, with no regard to its specific semantic content. Laughter in its most common use is a social gesture that’s far from what is generally considered as “humour”. Indeed, over the 1200 laugh episodes analyzed by Provine, the typical laughter causing utterances are humdrum like “It was nice meeting you”, or “How are you?”

We’ve seen that laughter is a kind of gesture to mark the social significance of an utterance. What kind of social significance? Provine argues that at least one social role played by laughter is “a signal of dominance or subservience.” (Provine p30) And the /obvious/ corollary follows, that “the desire by women for men who make them laugh may be a veiled request for dominant males.” (Provine p35) Heh. Cheap chauvinism aside, how do we reconcile this view with other social roles of laughter and humour? Earlier I’ve said laughter and humour has it’s evolutionary origin in animal play (again, following Provine). It’s not clear how to interpret dominance/subservience in the guise of play, or play as dominance/subservience. Provine doesn’t explicitly resolve this tension between the different social roles of laughter. In fact, there’s a disassociation in Provine’s book between theoretic principles and claims based on ethnological studies. He hints at “probable” principles, but is reluctant to explicitly connect these principles to his claims, probably to avoid “just-so” stories. In the absence of explicitly stated principles, Provine’s ethnological claims seem fragmentary, and even contradictory as in this case. Nevertheless, Provine mentions in passing that “[l]aughter plays a somewhat similar, nonlinguistic role in social bonding, solidifying friendships and pulling people into the fold.” (Provine p47) The crucial principle is social bonding; it underlies the dominance-subservience use of laughter, the social-play of laughter, and the ingroup-inclusion and outgroup-exclusion use of laughter.

To see how the principle of social bonding underlies the different social roles of laughter, we need to consider of the participants in a laugh episode, who are laughing, who are not, and who are laughed at. To simplify the analysis, we can consider an interaction involving two people. When both participants are laughing, we have the sort of laughter interaction we are most familiar with. It is also the most innocuous, where the two are just having a good time, and in so doing, their relationship is enhanced. Less innocuously, we also laugh with each other /at/ others. Those we laugh /with/ are included in our social group, and those we laugh /at/ are excluded, and victimized by our sneer and ridicule. This use of laughter is well noted by Thomas Hobbes, where it is an expression of a “sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.” Lastly, where there’s an asymmetry in laugh between the participants, there’s a power relation. We laugh /for/ our superiors in a sort of sycophantic buffoonery. We display a willingness to establish social bond with them. This claim is supported by ethnological studies that document the strategic use of laughter. People in the lower social rungs would giggle in the presence of the higher caste, as a self-humbling behavior (Provine p30-31). It is also documented that a woman laughs more in the presence of a man, especially if she’s attracted to the man. How to interpret this particular piece of data depends on your political correctness. In any case, those who seeks to maintain an air of authority and superiority tend to refrain from giggling.

The relationship between humour and laughter is like the relationship between language and small talk. Theoreticians are quick to analyze why humour is funny or how language communicate anything, yet they are slow to appreciate that more often, we engage in small talk not intending to communicate, or we laugh where nothing is funny. As discussed above, we laugh and we talk to each other in order to form and enhance social bonds. In a social interaction, the important question is not /what/ is exchanged, but the fact that something, anything, is exchanged. Puffs of air. Touch. Gifts. Seminal fluid. Whatever.

We laugh for social reasons. Humour is just one of those things that make us laugh. I claimed early in this essay that humour is the artifact of our overdeveloped brain. What I am claiming is that all the sophistication we find in humour is a hypertrophism enabled by our intellectual capacity. The idea of hypertrophism is central in E.O. Wilson’s account of human nature, in his book “On Human Nature”. He argues that biology endows us with certain tendencies, and throughout the generations, by an interaction between culture and genetics, these tendencies take on a life of their own. For example, by virtue of us being social animals, we attribute minds to others, and because of this, we have the tendency to attribute minds to objects as well. This anthropomorphizing tendency (among others) develops over the generations into religions in all their apparent absurdity. Similarly with laughter, our linguistic capability and sophisticated social skill fuel the development of humour to its full complexity. It is through this development that humour acquired its “grammar”, or “Platonic form”, something that is analyzable outside its social context.

One influential theory of humour is that unmet expectations are funny. Why? Perhaps it can be traced back to its social origin. An unmet expectation in a social context is a violation of social expectation. The canonical example is perhaps, “your ass looks fat… just kidding!” This “joke” of course doesn’t work. But the general principle is clear: by reinterpreting a social gaffe as “play”, the violation of expectation is no longer taken as an offence. Whether this reinterpretation can occur depends on one’s audience. If one wishes to be charitable, one forgives the social gaffe, and takes it as a joke. This is why a Jew can tell Jewish jokes, but Hitler can’t. The violation itself isn’t funny, rather, it’s the reinterpretation that results in laughter. More precisely, the reinterpretation itself doesn’t provoke laughter, but the final reinterpreted state of “play” does. This idea better explains why a comedian can do the same routine over and over, and audience would still roll on the floor. Each time we “forgive” anew. If unmet expectation is the whole story, then listening to a joke enough times, we would come to expect the unexpected. Finally, what sense do we make of the most rarefied forms of humour? Witticism, puns, and logical puzzles? Consider:

The barber that shaves everyone that doesn’t shave himself.
A knife missing its blade and handle.
This is like deja vu all over again.

Marvin Minsky argues that others laugh at us to make us learn. Eventually “we learn to produce the same effects entirely inside our own minds. We no longer need the ridicule of those other people, once we can make ourselves ashamed by laughing silently at our own mistakes.”

References

Provine, Robert.
Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.
This book pins down the evolutionary origin of laughter pretty well, but it has precious little to do with what we ordinarily consider as humour. You have to connect the dots for yourself, as I tried to do in this essay. A nice read to ground Philosophical/Literary speculations on humour. Feel free to read it really fast. I would suggest skipping the final third of the book.

Minsky, Marvin.
The Society of Mind.
A fascinating book. Lacking in hard evidence though. Minsky writes VERY well. It’s amazing how he can explain stuff using ordinary language.

McNeill, David.
Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought.

Wilson, Edward O.
On Human Nature
Wilson is an elegant writer. Thought provoking. Though after 30 years, it’s less scandalous than it probably was back then. Highly recommended.