Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

More striking is how human laughter differs from that of our primate relatives—gorillas, chimps, and bonobos. In the most rudimentary sense, the laughter of the great apes resembles our own. Their relaxed open-mouth displays and panting vocalizations look and sound quite familiar. They emit these displays in similar contexts as we do—when being tickled and during rough-and-tumble play. As with humans, chimps and apes are most likely to show open-mouthed play faces in developmental periods (adolescence) and times of day (leading up to feeding) where play can defuse conflict. Yet the laughter of chimps and apes is more tightly linked to inhalation and exhalation patterns than that of humans. As a result, it is emitted as short, repetitive, single-breath pants, and has little acoustic variety.

Human laughter, by contrast, is stunning in its diversity and complexity. It is a language unto its own. There are derisive laughs, flirtatious laughs, singsongy laughs, embarrassed groans, piercing laughs, laughs of tension, silent, head-lightening laughs of euphoria, barrel-chested laughs of strength, laughs that signal the absurdity of the shortness of life and the extent to which we care about our existence, contemptuous laughs that signal privilege and class, and laughs that are little more than grunts or growls. It is because of this heterogeneity that laughter has escaped simple theoretical formulation. It is the analysis of this heterogeneity that will lead to an answer about why we laugh.

LAUGHTER FACTS

 

In T. C. Boyle’s Drop City, a community of hippies, devoted to free love, spontaneous ritual, and immersion in nature, moves from their compound, Drop City in Sonoma County, California, to the last outpost of unspoiled nature—arctic Alaska. This journey, an expression of the American spirit, provides ample opportunity for laughter amid the inevitable conflicts of free love and broken-down cars and all too earthly negotiations of who does the dishes in a commune devoted to passion and ecstasy. Boyle’s descriptions of laughter reveal several insights about laughter:

He heard Star laugh though, a hard harsh dart of a laugh that stuck right in him as he went off into the night, looking for something else altogether.

 

Her first response was a laugh, musical and ringing, a laugh that made the place swell till it was like a concert hall.

 

And then he began to chuckle, a low soft breathless push of air that might have been the first two bars of a song.

 

There was a smattering of nervous laughter when he descended the steps and the laughter boiled up into a wild irrepressible storm of hoots and catcalls and whinnying shrieks as the door pulled shut and Norm put the bus in gear and headed off toward the lights of Canada.

 

Star let out a laugh in response to something Jimmy had said, and then they were all laughing—even him, even Marco, though he had no idea what he was laughing about or for or whether laughing was the appropriate response to the situation.

 

A new round of laughter. Dale Murray joined in too, whinnying along with the rest of them.

 

Suddenly he let out a laugh—a high sharp bark of a laugh that startled the dog out of his digestive trance—and he raised his head and gave Marco a sidelong look.

 

“Big spender,” she said, and her laugh trailed out over the river, hit the bank and came rebounding back again.

 

He then heard a squeal from Merry, or maybe it was Lydia, and a long sustained jag of laughter from all three of them, as if the very fact of his existence was the funniest thing in the world.

 

There were a few sniggers, a nervous laugh or two.

 

But they ate caribou tongue and Eskimo ice cream (caribou fat whipped into a confection with half a ton of sugar and a scattering of sour berries; Pan tasted it—“Ice cream, brother, it’s ice cream,” Joe Bosky told him, egging him on, but he spat it right back out into the palm of his hand, and the whole room went down in flames, laughing their asses off, funniest thing in the world, white man).

 

Pamela took one look at her and burst out laughing—she had to set down her cup because she was laughing so hard, her eyes squeezed down to semi-circular slits, her hands gone to her temples as if to keep her head anchored on her shoulders.

 

A first and perhaps most basic laughter fact is that nearly all laughter—darts, barks, sniggers, whinnies, hoots, jags, shrieks, catcalls—is social. Estimates indicate that laughter is thirty times more likely to occur around others than in isolation. We must move outside the individual’s mind to understand ways in which laughter binds people together.

Laughter is contagious. Laughter spreads to others, it washes over them, it sticks in people like darts, it fills rooms with a certain quality, it prompts others to begin laughing for no reason intelligible to the conscious mind. In Drop City, laughter routinely boils up into rounds, cascades, and storms. Rooms swell with laughter like music halls.