IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger HawkeyExperienced Group: AnneTextWhat makes us laugh?If we ask ourselves what triggers a good laugh, the obvious answer is that it is a response to somethingwe find funny. But one scientist, Robert Provine, who has spent nearly two decades studying laughter,says that humour has surprisingly little to do with it. Provine, a neuroscientist at the Universityof Maryland in the US and author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, realised early on in hisresearch that you cannot capture real-life laughter in the laboratory because as soon as you placeit under scrutiny, it vanishes. So, instead, he gathered his data by standing around in public places,eavesdropping on people’s conversations, secretly noting when they laughed.Over the course of a year he collected 1200 laugh episodes - an episode being defined as the commentimmediately preceding the laughter and the laughter itself - which he sorted by speaker (the persontalking), audience (the person being addressed), gender and pre-laugh comment. His analysis of thisdata revealed three important facts about laughter. Firstly, that it is all about relationships. Secondly,that it occurs during phrase breaks in speech. And thirdly, that it is not consciously controlled. ‘It’sa message we send to other people - it practically disappears when we are by ourselves,’ he says.Perhaps most surprising of all is Provine’s finding that only 15-20 per cent of everyday commentspreceding laughter are remotely humorous. ‘Laughter usually follows comments like “I’ve got to gonow” or “Here’s John.”’The fact that we don’t have control over when we laugh suggests that it must be deeply embeddedin our nature. Indeed, studies of the play behaviour of great apes suggest that laughing has beenaround a lot longer than we have. Chimpanzees laugh while they are having play fights althoughthe sound is quite different to that made by humans due to their different vocal apparatus. Instead ofchopping a single outbreath into the ‘ha-ha’ sound that characterises our laughter, chimps’ laughtersounds like panting.A recent study of orangutans reveals a deeper similarity with humans. A team of researchers watchedthe play behaviour of 25 individuals aged between two and twelve at four primate centres. ‘Inparticular we analysed the facial expressions that they produce during social play,’ says Dr MarinaDavila-Ross of the University of Portsmouth. ‘It’s a relaxed expression where they open their mouthand show their upper teeth. It’s very similar to the human expression of laughter.’The team discovered that when one orangutan displayed this expression, its playmate would oftenproduce the same expression less than half a second later. The speed with which this mimicry occurredindicated that the orangutan had not had time to decide on the response - in other words the laughterwas contagious. ‘In humans, mimicking is a mechanism that enables us to understand our socialpartner better, and this helps us to cooperate and form social bonds. It is clear now that it evolved priorto humankind,’ says Davila-Ross.The fact that we share laughter with great apes suggests that it emerged in our ancestors sometimebefore the split with chimpanzees six million years ago. But it may have evolved even earlier thanthat. Research conducted at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, US, found that even rats producechirping sounds comparable to laughter when playing or when tickled and the common ancestor ofrats and humans lived 75 million years ago. The fact that laughter is triggered by tickling suggests astrong link to humans, because, as Provine puts it, ‘tickle is the most ancient and reliable stimulus of360 www.ielts.org