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History of laughter One of the primary expressions of the ancient world (from the beginning of human history until the Early Middle Ages) conception of laughter are the apocryphal letters of Hippocrates about Democritus . Laughter categories Physiologically laughter can be subcategorised into various groupings depending upon the extent and pitch of the laughter: giggles, clicks (which can be almost silent), chortles, chuckles, hoots, cackles, sniggers and guffaws are all types of laughter. Smiling may be considered a mild silent form of laughter. Some studies indicate that laughter differs depending upon the gender of the laughing person: women tend to laugh in a more "sing-song" way, while men more often grunt or snort. On the other hand, laughing at somebody is considered to be ridiculing an individual, or as Alexander Bain put it, degrading some notable "person, interest or institution". Some consider this form of laughter to be the mind's way of "purging" negative, unwanted things and thoughts not of the self. For example, when a young boy sees another boy fall down, he may laugh because he knows that he does not want to fall down himself, therefore by "laughing" he is pushing the negative thought of falling down out of his mind. In his report on the Milgram experiment, Milgram writes that, after being authoritatively instructed to repeatedly give another person painful shocks, fourteen of his visibly-distressed subjects "showed definite signs of nervous laughter and smiling." He writes: "The laughter seemed entirely out of place, even bizarre. Full-blown, uncontrollable seizures were observed for 3 subjects. On one occasion we observed a seizure so violently convulsive that it was necessary to call a halt to the experiment. The subject, a 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman, was seriously embarrassed by his untoward and uncontrollable behavior. In the post-experimental interviews subjects took pains to point out that they were not sadistic types, and that the laughter did not mean they enjoyed shocking the victim."* Laughter in other animals Laughter might not be confined to humans, despite Aristotle's observation that "only the human animal laughs". Chimpanzees show laughter-like behaviour in response to physical contact, such as wrestling, chasing, or tickling, and rat pups emit short, high frequency, ultrasonic vocalisations during rough and tumble play, and when tickled. Rat pups "laugh" far more than older rats. Chimpanzee laughter is not readily recognisable to humans as such, because it is generated by alternating inhalations and exhalations that sound more like breathing and panting. The differences between chimpanzee and human laughter may be the result of adaptations that have evolved to enable human speech. However, some behavioural psychologists argue that self-awareness of one's situation, or the ability to identify with somebody else's predicament, are prerequisites for laughter, so animals are not really laughing in the same way that we do. Babies start to laugh at about 4 months of age; J.Y.T. Greig writes, quoting ancient authors, that laughter is not believed to begin in a child until the child is forty days old. Laughter and the brain
Possible medical effects of laughter While it is normally only considered cliché that "laughter is the best medicine," specific medical theories attribute improved health and well-being to laughter. A study demonstrated neuroendocrine and stress-related hormones decreased during episodes of laughter, which provides support for the claim that humor can relieve stress. Norman Cousins wrote a book, Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived by the Patient, in 1979, on his experience with laughter in helping him recover from a serious illness. In 1989, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article, wherein the author wrote that "a humor therapy program can increase the quality of life for patients with chronic problems and that laughter has an immediate symptom-relieving effect for these patients, an effect that is potentiated when laughter is induced regularly over a period". Another article, some years later, reported on a medical situation, laughter syncope, where laughter causes a person to lose consciousness. Researchers frequently learn how the brain functions by studying what happens when something goes wrong. People with certain types of brain damage produce abnormal laughter. This is found most often in people with pseudobulbar palsy, gelastic epilepsy and, to a lesser degree, with multiple sclerosis, ALS, and some brain tumours. Inappropriate laughter is considered symptomatic of psychological disorders including dementia and hysteria. Some therapy movements like Re-evaluation Counseling believe that laughter is a type of "bodily discharge", along with crying, yawning and others, which requires encourgement and support as a means of healing. Why we laugh A number of competing theories have been written. For Aristotle, we laugh at inferior or ugly individuals, because we feel a joy at being superior to them. Socrates was reported by Plato as saying that the ridiculous was characterised by a display of self-ignorance. Schopenhauer wrote that it results from an incongruity between a concept and the real object it represents. Hegel shared almost exactly the same view, but saw the concept as an "appearance" and believed that laughter then totally negates that appearance. For Freud, laughter is an "economical phenomenon" whose function is to release "psychic energy" that had been wrongly mobilised by incorrect or false expectations. Philosopher John Morreall theorises that human laughter may have its biological origins as a kind of shared expression of relief at the passing of danger. The General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) proposed by Victor Raskin and S. Attardo identifies a semantic model capable of expressing incongruities between semantic scripts in verbal humour; this has been seen as an important recent development in the theory of laughter. Recently Peter Marteinson theorised that laughter is our response to the perception that social being is not real in the same sense that factual states of affairs are true, and that we subconsciously blur the distinctions between cultural and natural truth types, so that we do not normally notice their differing criteria for truth and falsehood. This is an ontic-epistemic theory of the comic (OETC). Robert A. Heinlein's view of why people laugh is explained in one of his most praised novels, Stranger in a Strange Land, "because it hurts", is empathic but also a release of tension. How laughter happens (cognitive model) In modern times, the tendency is toward acceptance of incongruity as the probable cause of laughter, and incongruity-based theories are slowly gaining ground, although other schools of thought still hold some favour. A common explanation of humour (in the broader sense of 'laughter-provoking') is based on language. Premises: as we interpret a text, we automatically consider what language says, supposes, doesn't say, and implies (this is the perspective of hermeneutics); the sentences we listen to and we tell, follow the universal conversational rules, that can be reduced to only one: be relevant. This is the basis of the cognitive model of humor: the joke creates an inconsistency, the sentence appears to be not relevant, and we automatically try to understand what the sentence says, supposes, doesn't say, and implies; if we are successful in solving this 'cognitive riddle', and we find out what is hidden within the sentence, and what is the underlying thought, and we bring foreground what was in the background, and we realize that the surprise wasn't dangerous, we eventually laugh with relief. Otherwise, if the inconsistency is not resolved, there is no laugh, as Mack Sennett pointed out: "when the audience is confused, it doesn't laugh" (this is the one of the basic laws of a comedian, called "exactness"). This explanation is also confirmed by modern neurophysiology (see section below, Jokes and brain) See also Notes | |||||||||||
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