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The Laughing Species
Natural History, Dec, 2000 by Robert R. Provine
A familiar vocal act reveals its evolutionary past.
Among friends, we voice our instinctive social call of "ha-ha-ha," a sound more like the cries and songs of wild animals than like human speech. And when we hear laughter, we often bark back "ha-ha-ha," joining fellow Homo sapiens in a bizarre, contagious chorus. Our brains have a built-in laugh detector, which, once triggered, activates a neural circuit that produces the movement we ultimately hear as laughter. Somehow, all members of our species usually manage to laugh at just the right times, without consciously understanding what they are doing. A universal human signal, laughter is generated and recognized by people of all cultures, yet it has only recently come under scientific scrutiny.
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I began my study of laughter a decade ago, in the course of a thirty-year search for the neurological bases of behavioral development and evolution, which I studied in stages ranging from embryo to adulthood. I was particularly interested in "behavioral fossils," such as the neurological vestiges of flight in living flightless birds. No ostrichlike bird I tested (emu, rhea, ostrich, cassowary) manifested any behavioral trace of its flighted past, never flapping under any circumstances. Penguins, by contrast, flap their way underwater, though in air they are flightless and have lost the neurobehavioral mechanism that triggers flapping in flighted birds when they fall from a height. In pursuit of bigger game, I began searching for similar archaic behavior in humans, focusing on the apparently primitive vocalization of laughter.
My choice was partly tactical. When a researcher is investigating a neurological mechanism, it's best if everyone has it; besides, the neuromuscular basis of "ha-ha" is more easily understood than that of complicated vocalizations such as speech. To my surprise, little was known about the act of laughter. Most of what I found concerned humor--speculations about what makes jokes funny, or frothy tracts about "laughing your way to health." So in the tradition of an anthropological field study, three undergraduate research assistants and I set out to observe laughing people in their natural habitats, from the university student union to suburban malls and city sidewalks.
Whenever we heard laughter, we noted what had been said immediately before it occurred, the gender of the speaker and the audience (the person addressed), and whether it was the speaker or the audience who laughed. Our collection of 1,200 cases of natural laughter yielded several findings so unexpected that initially I did not believe them. Most laughter was not a response to jokes or other formal attempts at humor; the typical pre-laugh comments, such as "I've got to go now" or "Look, it's Andre," were hardly knee-slappers. And unlike the scenario of comedy performance, speakers laughed almost 50 percent more often than their audiences.
The critical stimulus for laughter was the presence of another person, not the cracking of a joke--or, for that matter, a sight gag, comic gesture, or other visual cue (plenty of laughter is present in telephone conversations, a purely auditory mode of communication). This requirement was confirmed in a study in which a group of my students kept a diary of the circumstances of their own laughter. When the students were by themselves and the sources of vicarious social stimulation were removed (television, radio, cinema, reading), laughter almost totally disappeared. Even when we are very happy, we seldom laugh when alone. The canned laughter added to television shows taps another social aspect of laughter: its potent tendency to trigger laughter in those who hear it, synchronizing the response of an entire group. Although Time magazine included laugh tracks in its "100 Worst Ideas of the Century," viewers do react to them by laughing more and by rating jokes as funnier.
In her best-selling book You Just Don't Understand, linguist Deborah Tannen described gender differences in speech. The gender differences in laughter may be even more pronounced. In our 1,200 cases, we found that while both sexes laughed a lot, females laughed the most, especially when conversing with males. In contrast, men may yuk it up with their male pals but fall strangely silent in the presence of women--in fact, a male speaking to a female was the only gender combination that produced less speaker laughter than audience laughter. In general, women are the leading laughers, while men are the best laugh-getters. This pattern develops early in life: think back to your high-school class clown--most likely it was a guy.
Women may use their laughter as an unconscious vocal display of compliance with or subservience to a more dominant, usually male, group member. In many societies, from the Tamil of southern India to the Tzeltal of southeastern Mexico, laughter is a self-effacing behavior of both males and females who occupy subordinate positions. It offers a revealing probe into hierarchical social relations because it's not consciously controlled and is relatively uncensored. By contrast, we exercise more control over word selection in speech. If you doubt the involuntary nature of laughter, ask a friend to laugh. Some people may produce a burst of genuine laughter at your unusual request, but even they will report that they can't "laugh on command" and will fail to produce convincing voluntary laughter. We are better at intentionally inhibiting than at intentionally producing laughter. (Crying, another emotional signal, is even more difficult to control.)
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