Given the differences in male and female laugh patterns, is
laughter a factor in meeting, matching and mating? I sought an answer in
the human marketplace of newspaper personal ads. In 3,745 ads placed on
April 28, 1996 in eight papers from the Baltimore Sun to the San Diego
Union-Tribune, females were 62% more likely to mention laughter in their
ads, and women were more likely to seek out a "sense of humor" while men
were more likely to offer it. Clearly, women seek men who make them
laugh, and men are eager to comply with this request. When Karl Grammar
and Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt studied spontaneous conversations between
mixed-sex pairs of young German adults meeting for the first time, they
noted that the more a woman laughed aloud during these encounters, the
greater her self-reported interest in the man she was talking to. In the
same vein, men were more interested in women who laughed heartily in
their presence. The personal ads and the German study complement an
observation from my field studies: The laughter of the female, not the
male, is the critical index of a healthy relationship. Guys can laugh or
not, but what matters is that women get their yuks in.
In many societies world wide -- ranging from the Tamil of Southern
India to the Tzeltal of Mexico -- laughter is self-effacing behavior, and
the women in my study may have used it as an unconscious vocal display of
compliance or solidarity with a more socially dominant group member. I
suspect, however, that the gender patterns of laughter are fluid and
shift subconsciously with social circumstance. For example, the workplace
giggles of a young female executive will probably diminish as she ascends
the corporate ladder, but she will remain a barrel of laughs when
cavorting with old chums. Consider your own workplace. Have you ever
encountered a strong leader with a giggle? Someone who laughs a lot, and
unconditionally, may be a good team player, but they'll seldom be a
president.
The laughter virus
As anyone who has ever laughed at the sight of someone doubled over
can attest, laughter is contagious. Since our laughter is under minimal
conscious control, it is spontaneous and relatively uncensored.
Contagious laughter is a compelling display of Homo sapiens, a social
mammal. It strips away our veneer of culture and challenges the
hypothesis that we are in full control of our behavior. From these
synchronized vocal outbursts come insights into the neurological roots of
human social behavior and speech.
Consider the extraordinary 1962 outbreak of contagious laughter in
a girls' boarding school in Tanzania. The first symptoms appeared on
January 30, when three girls got the giggles and couldn't stop laughing.
The symptoms quickly spread to 95 students, forcing the school to close
on March 18. The girls sent home from the school were vectors for the
further spread of the epidemic. Related outbreaks occurred in other
schools in Central Africa and spread like wildfire, ceasing
two-and-a-half years later and afflicting nearly 1,000 people.
Before dismissing the African outbreak as an anomaly, consider our
own technologically triggered mini-epidemics produced ,by television
laugh tracks. Laugh tracks have accompanied most television sitcoms since
September 9, 1950. At 7:00 that evening, "The Hank McCune Show" used the
first laugh track to compensate for being filmed without a live audience.
The rest is history. Canned laughter may sound artificial, but it makes
TV viewers laugh as if they were part o live theater audience.
The irresistibility of others' laughter has its roots in the
neurological mechanism of laugh detection. The fact that laughter is
contagious raises the intriguing possibility that humans have an auditory
laugh detector -- a neural circuit in the brain that responds exclusively
to laughter. (Contagious yawning may involve a similar process in the
visual domain.) Once triggered, the laugh detector activates a laugh
generator, a neural circuit that causes us in turn to produce
laughter.
Furthermore, laughter is not randomly scattered through speech. A
speaker may say "You are going where?...ha-ha," but rarely, "You are
going...ha-ha...where?" This is evidence of "the punctuation effect" -- the
tendency to laugh almost exclusively at phrase breaks in speech. This
pattern requires that speech has priority over laughter.
The occurrence of speaker laughter at the end of phrases suggests
that a neurologically based process governs the placement of laughter in
speech, and that different brain regions are involved in the expression
of cognitively oriented speech and the more emotion-laden vocalization of
laughter. During conversation, speech trumps -- that is, it
inhibits -- laughter.
Mediocre medicine
Authorities from the Bible to Reader's Digest remind us that
"laughter is the best medicine." Print and broadcast reporters produce
upbeat, often frothy stories like "A Laugh a Day Keeps the Doctor Away."
A best-selling Norman Cousins book and a popular Robin Williams film
Patch Adams amplified this message. But left unsaid in such reports is a
jarring truth: Laughter did not evolve to make us feel good or improve
our health. Certainly, laughter unites people, and social support has
been shown in studies to improve mental and physical health. Indeed, the
presumed health benefits of laughter may be coincidental consequences of
its primary goal: bringing people together.
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