Caterina.net: Laughter in <i>Mind Wide Open</i>

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{ Saturday, January 15, 2005 }

Laughter in Mind Wide Open

Steven Johnson, in Mind Wide Open, writes about a scientist, Robert Provine, who studies laughter and wrote a book called Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. He started just by observing conversations and counting the times that people laughed when another person was speaking. But the weird thing he discovered was that the speakers laughed more than the listeners.

Speakers, it turned out, were 46 percent more likely to laugh than listeners -- and what they were laughing at, more often than not, wasn't exactly funny. Neither listeners nor speakers seemed to be laughing at traditional jokes. Provine and his team of grad students recorded the ostensible "punch lines" that triggered laughter in ordinary conversation. They found that only around 15 percent of the sentences that triggered laughter were humorous in any reasonable sense of the word. The big laugh lines included:

I'll see you guys later.
Put those cigarettes away.
I hope we all do well.
It was nice meeting you too.
We can handle this.
I see your point.
I should do that, but I'm too lazy.
I try to lead a normal life.
I think I'm done.

This list made me laugh out loud, which is a rare enough occurrence, because Provine found that laughter is mainly reserved for the company of others. He concluded that rather than being a response to any intrinsic humor in a conversation, laughter is an instinctive form of social bonding.

(photo by urumandimi. See the rest of the Laughter photoset for some more great laughing photos.)

LINK | 9:48 PM | TB

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