Here is a sampling of knee slappers to jump-start your day:
"Got to go now!""I see your point."
"It must be nice."
"Look! It's Andre."
Hey, wait a minute. Where are the guffaws, the chuckles, at the very least a polite titter or two? Get me laughtrack! Doesn't this deadbeat crowd know that such lines are genuine howlers, field-tested fomenters of laughter among ordinary groups of people in ordinary social settings?
We're not talking Aristophanes here, or even Phyllis Diller. We're talking the sort of laughter that we give and receive every day while strolling with friends in the park, or having lunch in the company cafeteria, or chatting over the telephone. The sort of social laughter that punctuates casual conversations so regularly and unremarkably that we never think about or notice it - but that we would surely, sorely miss if it were gone.
One person who has thought about and noticed laughter in great detail is Dr. Robert R. Provine, a professor of neurobiology and psychology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Provine has become a professional laugh-tracker, if you will, an anthropologist of our amusement, asking the deliciously obvious questions that science has not deigned to consider before. He has analyzed what, physically, a laugh is, what its vocal signature looks like and how it differs from the auditory shape of a spoken word or a cry or any other human utterance.
He has asked when people laugh and why, what sort of comments elicit laughter, whether women laugh more than men, whether a person laughs more while speaking or while listening. He has studied the rules of laughter: when in a conversation a laugh will occur, and when, for one reason or another, the brain decides it is taboo. He has compared human laughter to the breathy, panting vocalizations that chimpanzees make while they are being chased or tickled, and that any primatologist or caretaker will firmly describe as chimpanzee laughter.
Provine has eavesdropped on 1,200 bouts of laughter among people in malls and other public places, noting down the comments that preceded each laugh and compiling a list of what he calls his "greatest hits" of laugh generators, which include witless-isms like those quoted above.
In so doing he has made a discovery at once startling and perfectly sensible: most Most of what we laugh at in life is not particularly funny or clever but merely the stuff of social banter, the glue that binds a group together. Even the comparatively humorous laugh-getters are not exactly up to Seinfeld, lines like, "She's got a sex disorder: she She doesn't like sex;"; or "You don't have to drink. Just buy us drinks." It is probably a good thing that our laugh-meters are set so low, because very few of us are natural wits, and those that who are often get into bad moods and refuse to say a single clever thing for entire evenings at a time.
Provine, a tall man with a well-groomed academic-issue beard who in profile looks faintly like the actor Fernando Rey, is neither clownish nor severe, somehow remaining animated about his subject without becoming silly. He can laugh loudly on command to demonstrate his points, which is something many people refuse to do. In videos, Provine is shown approaching strangers on the Baltimore waterfront, telling them he is studying laughter and asking them to laugh for him. Usually, people give sidelong glances to their companions, grin, fuss with their hair and as he persists, they grow annoyed. "I can't laugh on command," they complain. "Tell me a joke first."
To Provine, that difficulty reveals something important about the nature of laughter. We can smile on command, albeit stiffly, and we can certainly talk on command, but laughter has an essential spontaneous element to it. It is a vocalization of a mood state, rather than a cognitive act, and as such it is difficult to fake, just as it is hard to force out tears. Those who are good at laughing on cue, said Provine, often have stage experience.
Provine summarizes much of his recent research in the current issue of American Scientist, and he recently presented results at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego. His work departs sharply from the well-mined territory of humor analysis, in which scholars gather at conferences to discuss the ontology of Woody Allen or Monty Python and leave one with a distinct taste of sawdust in the mouth. Provine is not interested in formal comic material or why some like Lenny Bruce and others Red Skelton, but in laughter as a universal social act.
"His work is extremely interesting, insightful," said Dr. William F. Fry, a psychiatrist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. "He's doing the sort of things that should have been done 300 years ago." Fry is no joke himself, having studied the aerobic, physical and emotional benefits that accrue when a person laughs. One hundred laughs, he discovered, is equivalent to 10 minutes spent rowing.
Lest it appear that Provine is in the business of amusing himself and making strangers uncomfortable, he elaborates on the many quite serious questions that the study of laughter addresses. Laughter gives you a foothold on the neurobiology of behavior, he said. "It is species-typical, everybody does it, and it is simple in structure, which gives you powerful leverage on the neurology behind it," he said.
"Looking at a common human behavior that is socially interesting gives us the opportunity to go back and forth between the neural circuitry and a higher social act," he said. Provine compares studying a simple system like laughter for clues to more complex types of human behavior to biologists' use of a simple organism like yeast or nematodes for delving into the thicket of genetics or brain development.
He points out that linguists and scientists who study speech are always searching for the deep underlying structure to language, those phonemes that might be recognized as language units by everybody, regardless of whether they are French, Chinese or New Guinean. But finding the common currency of language has proved quite difficult. "If you're interested in the mechanisms of speech, wouldn't it be useful to look at a vocalization that all individuals produce in the same way, such as laughter?" he asks rhetorically.
Laughter also has the useful property of being contagious, he said. When you hear laughter, you tend to start laughing yourself - hence the logic behind the sitcom's ubiquitous laugh-track. And it is easy to assess whether the brain's circuitry for recognizing laughter has been activated, Provine said. "You don't need to use electrodes or wait for clinical cases of brain lesions," to study laughter recognition, he said. All you have to do is see if the person laughs on hearing laughter.
The infectiousness of laughter also makes it a particularly interesting social activity to explore. Few behaviors, short of shouting "Fire" in a movie theater, can have such a dramatic, swelling impact on group behavior as can the burst of a merry chime of laughter. Indeed, Provine came to the field of laughter research after studying another highly contagious human behavior: yawning.
Before he could hope to get at any neural circuitry, Provine first had to do the basics, starting with what a laugh looks like. He brought recorded samples of human laughter to the sound analysis laboratory at the National Zoo in Washington, a place where the usual subjects of research are bird songs and monkey screams. There he and colleagues generated laugh waveforms and laugh frequency spectrums. They determined that the average laugh consisted of short bursts of vowel-based notes - haha or hehe - each note lasting about 75 milliseconds and separated by rests of 210 milliseconds. Whether a person laughs with a shy giggle, a joyous musical peal, or a braying hee-haw, "the key is the burst of vowellike sounds produced in a regular rhythmic pattern," he said.
A typical laugh also has a decrescendo structure, starting strong and ending soft. A laugh played backward, going from low to high bursts, sounds slightly strange, almost frightening, and yet it is still clearly recognizable as a laugh, just as a birdsong played backward would be; the same cannot be said for a human conversation played backward. "Laughter has more in common with animal calls than with what we think of as modern speech," Provine said.
Provine and his students also began gathering hundreds of episodes of everyday laughter. They were startled by the ordinariness of the comments that would elicit laughter. Equally surprising was how often people laughed at their own statements. The standard image of the comedian is the deadpan performer who hardly grins while the audience members convulse in laughter. But the average speaker chattering away laughs 46 percent more frequently than do those listening to the spiel.
There proved to be wide variations based on sex in the ratio of speaker-to-listener laughter. A man talking to a male listener laughs only slightly more than his companion will in response. If a woman is talking to a woman, she laughs considerably more than does her audience. By contrast, a male speaker with a female hanging on his words laughs 7 percent less often than does his appreciative hearer. And the biggest discrepancy of all is found when a woman speaks to a man, in which case she laughs 127 percent more than her male associate, who perhaps is otherwise occupied with planning a witty rejoinder.
Speakers and listeners alike abide by rules while laughing. Laughter almost never intrudes upon the phrase structure of speech. It never interrupts a thought. Instead, it occurs as a kind of punctuation, to reflect natural pauses in speech. This is true for listeners as well as the talkers: they do not laugh in the middle of a speaker's phrase, Provine said. And in fact to do so may signal psychological abnormality.
Laughter is, above all, a social act, Provine said. You are far more likely to talk to yourself while alone than laugh to yourself (unless you are watching television or reading, in which case you are engaged vicariously in a social event). Provine sees laughter as a within-group modulator, something designed to influence the tenor of an assemblage, to synchronize mood and possibly subsequent actions.