Prior to his death in 2019, psychology professor Robert Provine spent decades studying laughter. His approach was to observe the phenomenon as an alien who’d just landed on Earth would.
His goal? To get to the bottom of those strange noises we constantly make and where they come from. To do it, Provine made recordings of people laughing and brought them to a sound analysis lab located at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., where researchers typically study birdsong. He even built his own lab at one point for the purpose of mapping out laughter’s pitch and frequency.
Additionally, Provine documented thousands of instances of people laughing in public places, along with the conversations that led to the laughter. What he came to learn from those many observations was that the laughter he was overhearing wasn’t inspired by especially funny remarks.
“Laughter and humor are related but different things,” Provine once said. “Laughter is ancient. It’s a primate play vocalization. Humor is a more modern, cognitive and linguistic development. There was laughter long before there was humor.”
You’re 30 Times More Likely to Laugh in This Situation
When Provine began his research in the 1980s, the study of laughter was considered unexplored territory. He later published a number of his findings on the subject in a 2004 article from Current Directions in Psychological Science. Among the things that Provine discovered over the years was that people were 30 times more likely to laugh in social situations compared to solitary ones. When people were alone, they had a higher tendency to talk to themselves or smile.
Provine also pointed out that the people he’d hear speaking had a 46 percent higher chance of laughing than their audiences did, and that they would use their laughter as punctuation, inserting it at specific points in their vocal stream. This turned out to be true of the congenitally deaf people Provine observed as well, who would laugh at those same points while using sign language. Furthermore, Provine felt that only 10 to 15 percent of comments that prefaced people’s laughs were funny. Oftentimes, he found such comments to be as dull as somebody saying, “I’ve got to go now.”
So on that note, feel free to laugh it up right about here.
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