Why Did Evolution Make Us Laugh?

Graffiti grin

Source: Jonathan Silvertown

There is comedy in errors. Shakespeare showed us so, although the connection between error and humor had been recognized for millennia. The Bard took the plot for his Comedy of Errors from the Roman playwright Plautus, amplifying the farcical effect of the original by adding a second helping of mistaken identity between his characters. But 21st-century science has discovered something genuinely new about the comedy of errors that neither Plautus nor Shakespeare could ever have conceived.

Error, incongruity is the key to humor

It turns out that errors are much more than just a plot device for humorous tales — they are the very essence of what we find funny. There is an area in the human brain that is specifically dedicated to detecting errors and incongruity. These errors are processed, compared with expectation, and those judged humorous ricochet around the brain, producing laughter. Suddenly, with this discovery, the two cultures of science and art have collided and, like strangers meeting in a pub, we find them bonding over jokes.

Why are some errors funny and others not? Why is laughter involuntary and infectious? Laughter is found in all cultures and when heard it is recognisable across boundaries of language. Babies laugh and neither eyesight nor hearing is required to acquire the behaviour. All these characteristics strongly suggest that laughter is hard-wired into the human psyche, and to an evolutionary biologist like me that immediately provokes my favorite question: what good is it? Why did evolution make us laugh?

A confession

Though an evolutionary biologist, I first tiptoed into this territory as an interloper, more used to interrogating the whys and wherefores of plants than of minds. What I discovered was that from Aristotle (384–322 BCE) onwards, (almost) anybody who wants to be taken seriously has written about laughter: Henri Bergson, Charles Darwin, René Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, Artur Schopenhauer, to name only the most hilarious. ‘There are few things less entertaining than academics pontificating about laughter,’ as one more recent writer said, before proceeding to prove her point by doing just that. Pontificating can pay though:

How does the Pope pay his bills?

PayPal.

In the Primer of Humor Research, the editor calls trespassers like me ‘first-timer pests,’ and abhors our weakness for jokes. It’s a strange world in which the scholars are afraid that you will laugh, while the performers are scared that you won’t. In the academic reference Handbook of Humor Research, the editors lament that: ‘For reasons that remain unclear, many investigators published only one or two humor studies before abandoning the area in favour of some other research domain.’ Maybe the editors of the Primer and the Handbook can work it out between them?

I’ve noticed the same lack of fortitude among scientists who study slugs. Laughter and mollusks seem equally fatal to an academic career. Some subjects, it seems, are better not taken too seriously.

A man walks into a cinema, sits down and notices that there is a large slug sitting in the seat next to him.
‘What are you doing here?’ asks the man in surprise.
‘Well, I loved the book,’ replies the slug.

This goes to prove that neither slugs nor jokes about them get us anywhere. An awful lot of blind alleys have been explored on the long road to understanding humor. I know, I’ve been there.

Humor and Laughter

Back in the lab, a paper on how to get robots to be funny begins, ‘First, laughter has a strong connection with humor.’ ‘No kidding!’ But there is a serious distinction to be made. We should distinguish between humor — the stimulus, and laughter — the response. These are separate things and either may occur without the other, as any stand-up comedian knows only too well. Sir Ken Dodd (1927– 2018) defined the craft of comedy, of which he was a consummate master, as ‘the performance of humor to obtain laughter’. There will be jokes, perhaps about slugs, that you recognize as humorous, but that don’t make you laugh out loud. Conversely, a tickle can elicit laughter without the stimulus of humor. What tickles your fancy can be quite revealing.

What’s the difference between erotic and kinky?
Erotic is using a feather. Kinky is using the whole chicken.

Can we work out how humor works and why we laugh at it? Should we even try, or is analysing a joke like using a pin to explain how a balloon works? Why does explanation deflate rather than enhance a joke? There is a scientific explanation that I will explore in a later post. However, there is also a romantic notion that the moment we try to analyze a thing of beauty or joy, we destroy it, much like a vivisectionist investigating a throbbing heart with a scalpel. I write in the conviction that the very opposite is true — understanding increases rather than diminishes pleasure.

My plan

Although most laughter happens spontaneously and not in response to humor, jokes are my scalpels. They are selected to make you first laugh and then think. There is actually a prize, called the Ig Nobel, for scientific research that does the same thing. In 2018, the Ig Nobel Prize was won by a team of surgeons in Portland, Oregon for ‘using postage stamps to test whether the male sexual organ is functioning properly’. It makes you wonder what these guys think the proper function of the male sexual organ is. Actually, they used stamps to devise an inexpensive method for diagnosing erectile dysfunction during sleep. Well, only inexpensive if you use second-class stamps, of course. You create a collar of stamps that fits snugly around said organ before you go to bed. If you wake up in the morning with the collar torn along the perforations, you can turn over and wake your partner with the good news. Who said philately will get you nowhere?

Humor Essential Reads

Humor in Marketing: The Riches Are in the Glitches

When Humor Hurts: Playful Ribbing or Malicious Ridicule?

Here is my plan. It’s cunningly simple. If enough people rate this post, future installments will appear with answers to the questions posed here. If not, I’ll spare us all the trouble.