26 June 2009

Laugh and the World ...

Greetings,

Have you ever wondered why it is that some people can tell a joke and have everyone in stitches, but when you try to tell it, you're greeted by a stony silence?

No, it's not necessarily the way you tell it at all. (There ... doesn't that make you feel better?)

Before we look at why this happens, let's back-track a smidge and ponder for a moment the whole process of laughter. We sometimes think that we carbon-based bipeds are the only species sophisticated enough to get the joke, but that's not the case at all. In fact, researchers at Washington State University "discovered that rats emit an ultrasonic chirp (inaudible to humans without special equipment) when they’re tickled, and they like the sensation so much they keep coming back for more tickling."

And if you've ever spent any time closely watching animals or birds around you, you'll know for a fact that they play and often look as if they're laughing. You can tell when a cat is smiling or laughing (or wanting to be left alone) from the position of its whiskers:

A defensive, aggressive, angry cat will pull its whiskers back towards its body

A very happy, curious cat will push its whiskers forward.

An alert, interested and curious cat will “Put-up” or extended its whiskers in a full circle around the face:

An excited, animated animal will push its whiskers to point forward.

A resting cat that is content will relax its whiskers against its face (Source)

So this laughter thing is not a human prerogative, and now it seems that far from inventing the joke, we're the ones who've copied our simian cousins. Professor Robert Provine (Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Maryland) and Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist and psychologist from Washington State University, suggest that human laughter, the ha-ha sound we make, actually "evolved from the rhythmic sound -- pant-pant -- made by primates like chimpanzees when they tickle and chase one other while playing."

Professor Panksepp thinks the brain has ancient wiring to produce laughter so that young animals learn to play with one another. The laughter stimulates euphoria circuits in the brain and also reassures the other animals that they’re playing, not fighting.

“Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Professor Panksepp says. “Sophisticated social animals such as mammals need an emotionally positive mechanism to help create social brains and to weave organisms effectively into the social fabric.” (Source)

Laughter then is a way we show membership of a group (think of all the in-jokes told at the expense of outsiders who sit glumly by while those in the know laugh uproariously), and it's a way we show our position in a group.

Consider how many times you've told a corny joke to people who were lower down the Food Chain than you ... Did they look at you in a bored way or laugh? I'm betting they laughed, and their laughter would have been in direct proportion to the space between you and them on the aforementioned Food Chain! The higher up you are and the lower they are, the more they would have laughed.

And we don't just laugh because we find a situation funny.

If we're nervous, we laugh as a way of covering our nervousness or dispersing the nervous energy. I can remember being horrified when even my "best" students laughed at inappropriate places while watching All Quiet on the Western Front for a film study, until I realised that they had no other way of reacting to the horrors presented.

Many people (and this applies particularly to women) laugh to fill silences in conversations or to give themselves time to think of something to say.

So if you have a friend who laughs at everything you say, it may not be that you're the next Seinfeld or Groucho Marx, it could just be that this person is nervous or trying to think of something to say.

Which brings us back to our original question: why is it that when you hear a joke at a party everyone screams with laughter, but when you tell it to your mates at work the next day it falls flat? Because the social situation largely determines whether something is perceived as funny or not. At a party or a performance by a comedian, you're ready to laugh ... you want to perceive everything as hilarious (that justifies the money you've spent on the ticket for a start!)

That's why when you go to all the trouble of tracking down an obscure recording of a stand-up comic you've seen perform live, it's so disappointing. You need other people around you to provide the right atmosphere for laughter.

Laughing is "social glue" and according to Professor Provine, "most laughter is not about humor; it is about relationships between people. ...

"We found that most laughter does not follow jokes. People laugh after a variety of statements such as “Hey John, where ya been?” “Here comes Mary,” “How did you do on the test?” and “Do you have a rubber band?”. These certainly aren’t jokes. ...

"One of the remarkable things about laughter is that it occurs unconsciously. You don’t decide to do it. While we can consciously inhibit it, we don’t consciously produce laughter. That’s why it’s very hard to laugh on command or to fake laughter. (Don’t take my word for it: Ask a friend to laugh on the spot.)

"We don’t decide to laugh at these moments. Our brain makes the decision for us. These curious “ha ha ha’s” are bits of social glue that bond relationships.

"Curiously, laughter seldom interrupts the sentence structure of speech. It punctuates speech. We only laugh during pauses when we would cough or breathe." (Source)

Hmmm ... Maybe next time your boss decides to tell you a joke you should try coughing ...

And I'll leave you to ponder this little gem I found:

"You can fake an organism but you can't fake laughter."

That has had me chuckling all day ... It's a bit like that funniest photo I found many years ago.

Unintended humour is often much funnier than the carefully crafted variety, and this week's Little Something Extra examines the connection between laughter and your health, so you can get your daily dose of chuckles.

Here's an old story that illustrates what we've been chatting about ...

Three comedians are sitting around telling jokes at the back of a nightclub after a late gig. They’ve heard one another’s material so much, they’ve reached the point where they don’t need to say the jokes anymore to amuse each other – they just need to refer to each joke by a number.

"Number 37!" cracks the first comic, and the others break up.

"Number 53!" says the second comic, and they howl.

Finally, it’s the third comic’s turn. "26!" he quips. He gets nothing. Crickets. "What?" he asks, "Isn’t 26 funny?"

"Sure, it’s usually hilarious," they answer, "but it's the way you tell it…"

This week's quiz:

Some words just sound silly ... When my own kids were tiny, I took them to a park one day where there were some older children playing. One of these (a little boy about 6) was having trouble with his shoes and kept calling out to his mother to tie his shoelaces for him. For some reason my son, then about 3, thought this was the most hilarious thing he'd ever heard, and he started laughing so hard he soon had everyone around him laughing, too. This is because, as Professor Provine says, "Laughter is social and contagious. We laugh at the sound of laughter itself."

As soon as his sister was old enough to understand words, our son taught her the funny side of "shoelaces," and for the next decade, whenever we wanted to jolly either of them out of a bad mood, we just had to say "shoelaces" and they'd get the giggles.

The following could give the word "shoelaces" a run for its money ... see if you can match them up:

aardvark, spelunk, pumpernickel, plunk, floccinaucinihilipilification, hornswoggle, ennui, polliwog, rutabaga, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

1. to swindle, cheat, hoodwink, or hoax

2. nocturnal burrowing mammal of the grasslands of Africa that feeds on termites

3. a brassicaceous plant, Brassica napobrassica, having a yellow- or white-fleshed, edible tuber

4. to explore caves

5. the fear of long words

6. a tadpole

7. a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom

8. a coarse, dark, slightly sour bread made of unbolted rye

9. an act or instance of judging something to be worthless or trivia; the estimation of something as valueless - action or habit of estimating as worthless

10. to pluck (a stringed instrument or its strings); twang; to throw, push, put, drop, etc., heavily or suddenly; plump; to push, shove, toss, etc

Here's one of those stories that may strike you as funny or not ...

Three boys come down to the kitchen and sit around the breakfast table. The mother asks the oldest boy what he’d like to eat. "I’ll have some bloody French toast," he says. The mother is outraged at his language, hits him and sends him upstairs.

She asks the middle child what he wants. "Well, I guess that leaves more bloody French toast for me," he says. She is livid, smacks him and sends him away.

Finally she asks the youngest son what he wants for breakfast. "I don’t know," he says meekly, "but I definitely don’t want the bloody French toast."

Last week's quiz:

prehensile, folivorous, quadrupedal, arboreal, brachiation, atavistic, vibrissa, crepuscular, phylogeny, quadrumanous

1. locomotion using four hands (grasping extremities) as orang-utans do - QUADRUMANOUS

2. evolutionary history of a species or group of related species - PHYLOGENY

3. active at dawn and dusk - CREPUSCULAR

4. whiskers - VIBRISSA

5. living in trees - ARBOREAL

6. locomotion on four feet - QUADRUPEDAL

7. eats leaves - FOLIVOROUS

8. recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form and usually due to genetic recombination - ATAVISTIC

9. adapted for seizing or grasping - PREHENSILE

10. locomotion by arm swinging with full shoulder rotation; grasp/release propulsion, usually with hook-like grasp - BRACHIATION

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Here's a classic from Seinfeld:

TV commercials now show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you've got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem.

And from Steven Wright: I have a large seashell collection, which I keep scattered on beaches all over the world.

A Little Something Extra

"While it is common knowledge that laughter can serve to raise spirits and relieve stress, there is scientific evidence that laughter may also be able to aid in the curing of diseases. The notion that laughing has healing powers is not a new concept. Dating to at least ancient Greece, hospitals were built next to amphitheatres to help "cure" the patients.(6). Do we laugh because we're happy and healthy, or are we happy and healthy because we laugh?"

Read more from student Jackie Chew from Bryn Mawr College here

"In the 1970s, Norman Cousins, then a writer and magazine editor of the popular Saturday Review, was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.

"He theorized that if stress could worsen his condition, as some evidence suggested at the time, then positive emotions could improve his health. As a result, he prescribed himself, with the approval of his doctor, a regimen of humorous videos and shows like Candid Camera©. Ultimately, the disease went into remission and Cousins wrote a paper that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and a book about his experience, Anatomy of an Illness: A Patient’s Perspective, which was published in 1979. The book became a best seller and led to the investigation of a new field, known then as whole-person care or integrative medicine and now, lifestyle medicine."

More information than you can poke a stick at about the connection between laughter and health here

And one last example of what some of us find funny" (Oh ... only me?)

I bought a box of animal crackers and it said on it: "Do not eat if seal is broken." So I opened up the box, and sure enough...

Word of the week: Risible (adj) causing or capable of causing laughter; laughable; ludicrous; having the ability, disposition, or readiness to laugh; pertaining to or connected with laughing.

This word comes from the Latin ridere meaning .... (wait for it) ... to laugh!

dictionary.com explains the nuances: Risible differs from ludicrous ... ludicrous expressing that which is playful and sportive; risible, that which may excite laughter. Risible differs from ridiculous, as the latter implies something contemptuous, and risible does not.

Oxymoron of the week: laughter therapy

And a joke ... in Latin (of course)

Prehende uxorem meam, sis!

[pray-HAYN-day oox-OH-raym MAY-ahm SEES]