When You Bust Out Laughing

From time to time, most of us experience bouts of laughter that just seem to explode from within. We sometimes describe these episodes as having "busted out laughing." These instances lead many to conclude that laughter is a reflexive behavior. But is this a fair characterization?

I have my doubts.

We know from personal experience that people won’t all respond in the same way to potentially amusing situations. For example, we recognize that generally speaking, people raised in different cultures can often vary significantly in what they find funny. Those in certain professions will appreciate humor not appreciated by those unfamiliar with their work. And members of some religious groups find poking fun at their leaders or deities more acceptable than do members of others. Even a single individual doesn’t react to similar types of humor the same way all the time. They may laugh at something if happy and secure, for instance, but not if depressed or frightened. Or they will respond to a friend’s clowning antics but not those of an antagonist.

In previous posts, I often took the liberty of using the terms “we” or “they” as if each of us reacts to the same stimuli in much the same way. They were attempts to explain why we (collectively as humans) laugh, by describing its overarching evolutionary purpose. Now it’s time to shed light on why we (as individuals) don’t laugh—or, more precisely, why we don’t all laugh at the same things or to the same degree throughout our lives.

The funny bone

All human behaviors can be thought of as falling somewhere along a gradient from the instinctive, genetically “preprogrammed” responses on one end to those exclusively learned through cultural exchanges on the other. The difficulty in positioning laughter on that continuum is that, while our physical articulation of laughter and the “trigger” emotion (a.k.a. amusement) seem to be encoded in our genes, the interpretive process through which laughter is initiated is largely the result of learning.

The same could be said of other nonverbal communication like, for example, screaming or crying. The expression and underlying emotions (e.g., fear and distress) that trigger them are basically the same for people everywhere, but different individuals may respond to different stimuli, with each individual needing to reach a different fear or distress threshold before a scream or crying feels compulsory.

Our first task is to answer a fundamental question: Just how much discretion do individuals have when it comes to expressing laughter? There are those who consider laughter to be a reflex-like reaction, one that ensues with little or no forethought or conscious control. To some degree, this seems a valid conclusion. Certainly, laughter appears to be “hard-wired” into our behavioral response repertoire, at least in the sense that all healthy humans over the age of a few months are capable of laughter and use it to express amusement in similar circumstances. Even children who are born deaf and blind, who have never heard or seen others laugh, will themselves laugh in response to playful tickling or anxious situations (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1970).

Source: Danya Gutan/Pexels

So, is laughter a reflex?

Laughter may sometimes be uncontrolled, but that’s not the same as being a reflex. It’s not analogous to coughing when something’s irritating our throat, shivering when cold, or retracting our hand upon sensing sharp pain. Such reactions represent, to a large degree, a bypassing of conscious input from the brain. We don’t have to be thinking of the stimulus or appropriate reaction; we just experience the first and do the second. Laughter isn’t automatic in this sense.

This is not the case for laughter. We must consciously assess a situation to determine, subjectively, if it is amusing or not. Even tickling, which appears to provoke laughter in a near-reflexive way, doesn’t always produce the same outcome. Those who are not ticklish don’t respond at all. Many who are mildly ticklish may be much more so when gently restrained by a friendly hand. Those who are very ticklish don’t react with laughter when they attempt to tickle themselves—a topic for a future post. For many, simply the idea of being tickled can bring about a preemptive laugh response. So there is clearly some cognition involved. And while it’s true that we may laugh while dreaming, so too might we talk, or even walk, while dreaming; all are, in my opinion, correctly regarded as fundamentally conscious behaviors.

If the Mutual Vulnerability Theory of Laughter is correct, the first place we should focus our attention as we attempt to explain variations in the laugh response is how one differentiates a “normal” trait or behavior from a “vulnerability," and a vulnerability from a “deficiency." Much of this relates to individual, small-scale factors such as age, sex/gender, personality, and personal history.

© John Charles Simon