Laughter has surprisingly
little to do with jokes and
humor: Most laughter does not
come from listening to funny stories.
Robert Provine, a neuroscientist from
the University of Maryland, found that
we’re 30 times more likely to laugh
at something when we are talking to
our friends, even if what they’re saying
isn’t really funny. In this instance,
laughter helps communicate to our
conversational partners that we like and
empathize with them. In other cases,
we may use laughter to disguise our
nervousness or to ease tension.It’s not just the humor
that makes a joke funny:
People find jokes funnier when they are
told by someone they know, especially
if they consider that person funny.
A clever cartoon, explains Bob Mankoff,
the humor and cartoon editor at Esquire,
seems even funnier “if there are also
other variables we like, like the drawing
is good, or the comedian is one we
admire, or a person we don’t like is
being put down.”It will not help you lose
weight (sorry): While laughter
has been shown to improve your healthin many ways, it does not burn
more calories than going for a run,
sadly. Although laughing does raise
a person’s energy expenditure and
heart rate by about 10 to 20 percent,
you would have to laugh solidly for
up to three hours to burn off a bag of
potato chips.Humans aren’t the only
ones who do it: Researchers
in England who spent several months
with captive chimpanzee colonies
found that the primates laughed all the
time. Usually, the laughter came from
spontaneous reactions to physical
contact, such as wrestling, chasing,
tickling, or just being surprised. Others
have found evidence that rats laugh—
in a high-pitched, ultrasonic kind of
way—though rat pups laugh far more
often than the adults.It’s a universal language:
Laughter sounds basically the same
in every culture, leading some
researchers to believe that laughter
somehow connected our human ances-
tors wherever they encountered each
other. In fact, according to the University
of Kentucky, the sound of laughter is so
common and familiar that it can be
recognized if played backward.64 september 2019