The Surprising Science of Why We Laugh (#285)

3 Takeaways Podcast Transcript

Lynn Thoman

(https://www.3takeaways.com/)

This transcript was auto-generated. Please forgive any errors

Lynn Thoman: We tend to think of laughter as a reaction to something funny: a punchline, a joke, a moment of humor. But when you listen to laughter in real everyday conversations, a much stranger picture starts to emerge. So if laughter isn't really about humor, what is it for?

And why does laughter matter more than we think? 

Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is 3 Takeaways. On 3 Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world, and maybe even ourselves, a little better. 

Lynn Thoman: Today, I'm excited to be with neuroscientist Sophie Scott. She studies the science of laughter.

It turns out that everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. Laughter is not even primarily a response to humor. I'm excited to learn more.

Welcome, Sophie, and thanks so much for our conversation today.

Sophie Scott: Hello, and thank you very much for inviting me. 

Lynn Thoman: Why is laughter worth taking seriously? 

Sophie Scott: I think because it's probably one of the more important emotional expressions that we use socially.

If you ask people about what makes them laugh, they'll talk about comedy and jokes and humor, but if you actually look at people, what they do is they laugh when they're in company. Laughter is a social behavior. You are 30, three-zero times more likely to laugh if there's somebody else with you than if you're on your own, and you'll laugh more if you know those people, and you'll laugh more if you like those people.

And that's why you shouldn't think of it as an expression of amusement, actually, because most of the time, laughter has got nothing whatsoever to do with jokes. It's a social joy. It's a joy that you experience when you're with other people.

So I think you can think of laughter as being an expression of a sort of playful, socially delightful joy. It's something you experience when you're with other people. Now, that might be on a screen or it might be in real life, but there has to be that sense of a social connection for it to start happening. 

It's possible to laugh on your own. It's just much less likely. So I think from that perspective, it's really worth valuing laughter and taking laughter seriously because it's an emotional expression, but it's one that lives in social interactions.

And that makes it very, very interesting because unlike emotions like, say, fear and disgust or surprise, I was once walking down the street and slipped on some ice. I didn't completely fall over, but I slipped enough that I completely produced an involuntary vocalization of surprise. I went, “oh”, like that, absolutely involuntary.

And there's nothing social about that at all. That was just an emotion. I was just being driven off because I don't know quite where this is going, but something's happening.

Laughter doesn't work that way. 

Laughter, you do find that people laugh when they're on their own, but it's much, much less likely. It's primarily happening in these social interactions.

And it's happening in a highly communicative way as well as a sort of basic emotional expression way. So people will use laughter to show that they know and they're affiliated with the people that they're talking to. And also it's worth taking seriously because it works.

We will use laughter for lots of different reasons, but a really important reason why humans will use laughter is to reduce stress. And it's very effective at that as long as everybody joins in. If you share laughter together, you will feel better together.

You can actually use it to negotiate a better mood together, which makes it a very important emotion. 

Lynn Thoman: Sophie, if you want people to laugh, what do you do? 

Sophie Scott: It's interesting because there's no one thing that everybody finds funny. 

And that's like a truism for humor. There is no one joke everybody finds funny. There's no one comedian everybody finds funny.

Even slapstick humor, which is much more broad in its reach, there'll be somebody somewhere going, that's not funny, my brother died that way. So I don't try to get people laughing nowadays when I'm doing things in the lab. I don't bother trying to use humor at all. 

What we use are videos of normally television presenters who get the giggles while they're broadcasting and they have to keep talking because they're on air. And that's actually very effective because that just leans into the fact that laughter is highly contagious. A lot of the laughter we produce is happening just because we've heard or seen somebody else laughing.

And if you watch a video of somebody desperately trying to do a broadcast while they're really trying not to laugh, but the laughter keeps coming through, there's strong clues that that's spontaneous laughter, that is authentic laughter. But also they're desperately trying to cover it up, which makes it almost funnier than if they just started laughing. So that works very, very well to get people laughing.

And it doesn't require you to find anything funny and it doesn't require you to know any of the people involved. So a lot of the ones we use are actually from the U.S. So the people in the U.K. don't know who those people are, but they still laugh when they start laughing. 

Lynn Thoman: So interesting. Are people who laugh a lot happier?

Sophie Scott: Very, very hard to know. So everybody underestimates how often they laugh.

There aren't many studies on this, but every study that has got people to give a rating of how often they laugh and then actually observes them, finds that everybody is under-reporting their laughter. It's like we don't remember it almost. So it's difficult because you can't rely on people's self-report.

We've been developing a questionnaire about laughter and we found that the single biggest factor that sort of varies across certainly adults in the U.K. and in China about laughter is how much people think they laugh. So it is a big thing that people think about their laughter and how much they do or don't laugh a lot. But we can't find any predictive value of that. 

There's no relationship that we've found so far between how much people think they laugh and how much they actually do laugh. But I think the other thing that's true is if you remember that laughter doesn't happen randomly. Laughter happens when you're in certain social situations and people won't laugh if they're feeling really uncomfortable, even if they're with other people.

And they won't laugh if they're feeling very kind of exposed or like they're on show. So one of the easiest ways to get people to stop laughing is to get them into the lab and say, now laugh. They just don't do it.

They won't do it. So I think it's possible that people who are happier laugh more. But it's also possible that people who laugh more are happier.

The direction of causality is probably more like a virtuous circle. Both affects the other. But all of it's only possible because of the people that you're laughing with.

That's going to be affecting your mood as well. I can remember when I was a child, my father was a salesman and he was very good at using laughter socially. He was funny and people liked him because he was funny and he would make people laugh.

He was a funny, witty man. But I used to genuinely worry that people were buying... He sold carpets.

I was really worried that people would end up buying more carpets than they wanted to because he was making them laugh. Ooh, don't worry about it. But I'd noticed, even from a young age, that he laughed completely differently when he was with his friends. 

Mostly female friends, but he had a handful. Most people do. You don't have all that many really close friends.

And he laughed totally differently when he was with his close friends. He was almost kittenish. There was none of that dominating, controlling the room element to his laughter.

He was just delighted at being with his friends. And I think everyone has that. You're laughing with a lot of different people, but you're laughing really intensely and in a really relaxed way, I think, when not with just anybody.

And I think that's again where some of the power of laughter comes because if you think of laughter as being a really effective way of making and maintaining social bonds, and that's again one of the things you find about laughter, wherever you find it, it's often playing this role. Do people in conversation mirror each other in laughter also? I think they do.

If you think about contagion as being like that, so behavioral contagion is actually quite common in social animals. So if you look at a behavior like yawning, yawning is very, very common in animals. Many animals yawn, but lots of animals also yawn contagiously. 

So they yawn just because they have seen or heard another conspecific yawning. And it's a social signal. It's a sign of affiliation.

And you find it in humans. You find it in dogs and chimps. You find it in turtles and [inaudible]. 

So that's really, really widespread. And there are quite a lot of behaviors that work this way. So blinking is quite contagious.

Coughing is contagious. Scratching is contagious. And it's pretty complex.

So if you look at orangutans, they scratch contagiously. And actually it's a sign of anxiety in orangutans. If an orangutan is scratching itself, that means it's anxious. 

And if another orangutan picks up that, it mirrors back that scratching, they're basically indicating, oh, yeah, I know what you mean. This isn't great. So you have this whole world of sort of contagious behaviors, and they tend to have this affiliative element to them.

And it's also true for laughter. However, humans are the only animals where contagious laughter has been shown. So other animals laugh, but they don't laugh contagiously. 

They don't just catch a laugh, which makes it very interesting, partly also because it's something we learn to do. So contagious behaviors are not things we're born doing. Babies don't blink unless they need to refresh their eyes.

They don't yawn when somebody else yawns. They don't laugh when somebody else laughs. So we teach babies to do these contagious behaviors.

And then that becomes a very – actually it's a very important aspect of social interactions. The ability to mirror laughter back at each other very effectively is a great way for laughter to spread in a group of people. And it's also a great way of – if you think about it, it's having this very important affiliative role.

It's a great way of sort of getting that affiliative mirroring running in a very unconscious way. People very rarely notice that they're doing it. If you ask them why they're doing it, they will come up with a reason.

They'll say, oh, that was funny. But in fact, it wasn't. It was just contagion.

Lynn Thoman: So if laughter helps develop social ties and connections, are there people that use laughter transactionally?

Sophie Scott: Definitely. Definitely. If you think of that use of laughter to regulate emotions, so to deal with stressful situations, that's actually quite a common use of laughter in – we don't worry about it when it works.

But it can be a way that some people will laugh to deal with – sometimes with situations that are quite serious. When Roger Ailes– I'm going to say his name wrong – that man at Fox who had been a serial harasser of female colleagues that [they] made the film Bombshell about it. And then in 2016, lots of women started to tell their stories.

And he had quite a formal way of sort of propositioning women. And the number of women who said, when he'd propositioned them, that they'd laughed. And they were laughing to try and de-escalate that situation, to say, I know you don't mean it.

I know that you're just kidding. And to give him a plausible out, like I was just messing around. But of course, he can say, oh, they're laughing.

They're fine. They're enjoying it. There's a real complexity there.

That people's interpretation of laughter is as important as the intention somebody has with their laugh. It can be something that people will also use to try and cover up other things that are more serious. Lie to you, for example, and use the laughter as a sort of cloak to say, well, none of this matters.

This is all just fun. So definitely that's possible. And I think it's like a hall of mirrors, laughter.

The complexity of it in terms of both why it's being produced and how it is perceived is very, very non-fixed. Just because you want to laugh to be interpreted in a positive way, doesn't mean to say somebody necessarily will do so. So I had a horrible situation at work, just horrible, when a colleague rang up, a colleague with whom I already had quite a difficult relationship, not someone I knew well, but I relied on facilities associated with this person, so I had to keep them sweet.

And they called up to complain about something. And while they were calling up to complain, someone in the room with me started laughing. And nothing I could say could prevent them from believing that not only had I offended them and they were complaining about it, but now we were all laughing at them.

Now, they were anticipating negativity. They were not in a good mood with me. But that's not why the laughter happened. 

In fact, the laughter was me looking at a student going, what have you done? Like, seriously, what's going on here? And the student laughed because she was embarrassed. 

But it didn't matter. It didn't matter what I said. So the complexity is manifold. 

It's complex in terms of why we produce it, and it's complex in terms of how somebody perceives it and how they choose to interpret it.

Lynn Thoman: For spontaneous laughter, how does that affect both the person laughing and any listener?

Sophie Scott: I suspect probably one of the nice things about spontaneous laughter is you feel really good when you've been laughing anyway, but spontaneous laughter, it sounds like the sun coming out and it feels wonderful. You do get big physiological changes when you laugh full stop, but particularly if you start laughing hard, like a real spontaneous laugh. So you get a change in the uptake of the body's naturally circulating painkillers, which are endorphins, and that's why you feel buzzy and good when you've been laughing.

It's exactly the same as anything you might do after exercise, which is when you also get an endorphin hit. You get a runner's high when you've been laughing. You also get a reduction in adrenaline, and that endorphin buzz you get from any kind of laughter, even really fake laughter.

It seems to be to do with how you're engaging your ribcage. You also get a change in adrenaline. Adrenaline is that fight or flight hormone that makes your heart start racing when you're scared, and that is lower after you've been laughing than it was before you were laughing.

While you're actually laughing, it tends to go up because you're doing quite a lot of work. It's quite stressful for your heart when you're laughing. You also get a reduction in cortisol associated with laughter. 

Cortisol is a stress hormone. It's what wakes you up in the morning. It's why waking up in the morning can sometimes feel a bit grim.

It's also the hormone that runs at high levels when you are feeling stressed and you sleep badly and your appetite goes over and you don't feel right. That's cortisol at work. High levels of cortisol running chronically is not good for your mental health.

It's not good for your physical health. It has a slower lag than adrenaline, which works really quickly. It works much more slowly, cortisol, but you find cortisol levels drop off when people have been laughing.

You're feeling less stressed. You're feeling more relaxed. That is wonderful.

We should all laugh more.

Lynn Thoman: Definitely. In high-stress situations or jobs like police officers or doctors and nurses in hospitals, is laughter different? Is there more laughter to de-stress?

Sophie Scott: There does seem to be. This has been studied less about laughter but more about jokes, but of course the jokes are an attempt to get laughter going. What you find in high-stress professions like the police or the fire service or medics or nurses, you tend to find that there are professional jokes, things around which people joke.

So in the UK, apparently one of the things that the police laugh about in the UK is the fire service. They make jokes about the fire service and presumably vice versa. They also will make jokes about the things that they have to deal with, which can make their humor seem very dark, but actually I think that's doing several things all at once.

So it's giving people a reason to laugh together. You're doing a high-stress job in a team. You're going to improve your sense of bonding by getting a chance to laugh together.

You are going to be able to deal with some of the stressful things you have to deal with by expressly laughing at it. You are going to feel better together by laughing at things. You are keeping other people out. 

You're excluding people with the darkness of the thing that you're laughing at and the really specific job-related aspects of that. I don't think that's random. It's meant to be a bit shocking to other people because this is actually, you're the team that has to work together.

They are the outsiders. They don't understand. There is a literature describing this, and over the past couple of years there's been a number of cases in the UK where WhatsApp groups between police officers have been made public and revealing awful things, like some horrible crime scene where two sisters were killed in a park in the middle of London in a very public place.

It was a very, very horrible thing. One of the police officers who had to stand guard over the scene took inappropriate photographs and put them on the WhatsApp group of this crime scene. I absolutely guarantee you they were trying to be funny. 

It doesn't make it funny, but I'm certain that's what the intent was, and that's one of the reasons why it was so shocking. I'm not saying it's right at all, but that's, I think, an extreme example of what you find in high-stress jobs, which often is this very dark sense of humor, which is still aimed at getting laughter, but also really in an exaggerated way, keeping other people out.

Lynn Thoman:  Before I ask for the 3 takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with, is there anything else that's important about laughter that you would like to mention? What should I have asked you that I did not? 

Sophie Scott: People always want to know if it's different between men and women. Pretty much everything I've talked about here is the same for men and women. The only thing that comes up a bit is that everybody laughs more contagiously with someone they know than someone they don't know. 

Male and female familiarity absolutely rules for contagious laughter. I think women may have learned to use laughter as perhaps a way of managing situations with unfamiliar men, who can be something of a little bit of a mixed bag.

Lynn Thoman: Sophie, this has been great. What are the 3 takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today?

Sophie Scott: The first one is laughter is never neutral, and that's why it can sometimes be something that alarms you or amuses you, but it always has meaning, and your brain is always trying to work out that meaning. It's a very good tell about when things feel a little bit off, if laughter is wrong or if laughter is absent. So I think that's an important thing to remember.

Listen to your own laughter. Who do you laugh with? Who makes you laugh?

Who doesn't make you laugh? If you know someone who seems to laugh in a really irritating way, I bet you don't like them. Because usually it's you not joining in with the laughter as often as anything, and you're not laughing along. 

I don't think we have that kind of relationship. And I think value your laughter, because laughter, maybe it feels childlike. It feels trivial.

It doesn't feel civilized and sophisticated, and comedies never win Oscars, and people who are comedians are always assumed to be improvising on the spot rather than incredibly polished artists. 

But actually, laughter really matters in your day-to-day life. It's probably one of the most important things you do in your day, is the time when you're just chatting to colleagues with a cup of coffee and having a laugh about something that happened in a meeting. 

That feels like wasted time, but it's actually probably some of the most important time in your day. So value your laughter. Make time for it. 

Lynn Thoman:  That's wonderful advice. Thank you, Sophie. This has been terrific.

 Sophie Scott: It's an absolute pleasure. Lovely to meet you. Thank you.

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I’m Lynn Thoman and this is 3 Takeaways. Thanks for listening.

This transcript was auto-generated. Please forgive any errors.