A PRIEST, a horse and a gelatologist walk into a bar鈥� OK, while this is clearly the start of a terrible joke, gelatology 鈥� the study of laughter 鈥� is a serious business.
Laughter researchers, gelatologists, are beginning to work out why we laugh. They have uncovered how our brains 鈥済et鈥� a joke (it is to do with the prefrontal cortex region of the brain) and how laughter really is the best medicine. Now they are looking at the roots of laughter.
In ground-breaking laughter research published in The Quarterly Review of Biology in December last year, Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, New York, traced the evolutionary origins of laughter back to the time before humans split from apes. Laughter, they found, started off in early hominin groups between 4 and 2 million years ago. Our ancestors鈥� chuckles were not the 鈥渉a ha has鈥� of modern laughter, since they had not evolved the ability to pronounce these sounds. It was more like a staccato panting in response to touches and tickles 鈥� the same way apes laugh today.
Advertisement
As humans evolved, laughter took on a whole new meaning. About 2 million years ago, our ancestors gained the ability to control their facial expressions, so they could laugh at will as well as spontaneously. Only later, when humans evolved higher cognition and language, was laughter connected with humour.
So if laughter can be divorced from humour, what is it all about? The answer seems to be social control and group communication. Robert Provine of the University of Maryland in Baltimore county found that we mostly laugh during ordinary conversation rather than in response to jokes. The ability to make someone laugh is often associated with power dynamics. Making someone laugh puts you in a dominant position, as does laughing at someone. Provine found that women laugh more often than men, who are more likely to be the ones provoking the laughter.
Laughter is contagious 鈥� sitcom producers have used canned laughter since the 1950s for just that reason 鈥� but gelatologists have yet to figure out exactly why. It could be the result of a feedback loop triggered in the brain. The most extreme case of contagious laughter took place in Tanzania in 1962 when a group of schoolgirls got the giggles and the laughter spread to the surrounding areas, lasting for months.
Laughter researchers have even discovered the world鈥檚 funniest joke. In 2002, psychologist Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, announced the results of his quest to find the joke that made the most people laugh (see to find out the winner). Have you heard the one about鈥�
