May 13, 2008

Relations spawn best laugh track

By LJ Anderson / Daily News Columnist

Laughter and people go together. From the almost continuous laughter heard among friends to an appreciative audience responding to a comedian's monologue, the common denominator is people. We may associate laughter with professional laugh-getters, but relationships, rather than prepared jokes, are the primary driver of laughter in our lives. Its occurrence in social settings coexists with laughter's more primal nature as a spontaneous and largely involuntary response. When so moved, laughter just happens.
Neuroscientist Robert Provine, Ph.D., is a recognized expert in the field of laughter whose empirical research has taken him from shopping malls to student unions. He is professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of "Laughter: A Scientific Investigation," and numerous scientific articles on laughter.


Q: How do you define laughter, and how well do we understand it?

A: I think we understand it pretty well. Laughter is a series of short bursts of vowel-like sounds about 1/15th second long that repeat every 1/5th second - "ha, ha, ha." That is the simplest description of the sound. The exciting part involves when we do it - in that laughter is a social vocalization. We hardly ever laugh when we're alone; we laugh 30 times more in social than in solitary situations. It's more about relationships than jokes. If you record what people say before laughter occurs in conversation, it seldom follows comments that are joke-like.
There's a very different laugh pattern in men than women. Although both laugh a lot, men are the best laugh-getters, and one reason why there are more male than female comedians. Men laugh more at what men say, and so do women. It doesn't reflect a conscious decision because laughter is not under voluntary control. People go through their lives laughing in a very predictable way. For example, if two guys are talking and laughing and a woman joins them, the men will laugh less and the woman will laugh more. No one decides to do this. It just happens.


Q: How powerful is the contagious nature of laughter, and what accounts for that?

A: It's very powerful. When we hear laughter, we join in. That's one of the reasons why laugh tracks in TV situation comedies work. Hearing other people laugh increases the chance that you will laugh and rate something as funny. This practice in the entertainment industry also provides insights into human nature and how the brain works. We may have a laugh detector in our brain that, when activated, causes us to laugh. The evidence for such a thing is pretty good in that you don't decide to laugh - it happens automatically. Laughing when you hear laughter suggests that our nervous system is programmed in such a way that when a sound is heard, we make the sound ourselves. It's difficult to establish a brain region as the center of laughter because so many things can produce laughter. It can be produced by a joke based on a pun, a play of words, or a visual joke, and different parts of the brain would be involved in interpreting that. Most laughter is about social relationships so areas of the brain processing information about relationships would be involved. There may be a brain site responsible for producing the particular sound - on the output side - since everyone laughs in pretty much the same way.


Q: Do different types of laughter elicit different physiological responses?

A: There's only one kind of laughter, and you shouldn't try to put too fine an edge on what is an ancient verbalization. It's hard to laugh in other than the usual way or at other than the usual rate. I'm not saying that all laughs are identical, but it's better to see different kinds of laughter as variations on a theme - rather than being distinct. Otherwise, you wouldn't know that it was laughter. It's clear that laughter is a high-intensity behavior that gets a lot of our body involved. Something that hasn't been defined is how it differs from other related sounds. Laughter gets our physiology stirred up, but so do yelling and singing. No one has really examined how those different kinds of sounds differ. Laughter is a sound that has evolved to change the behavior of other people - like talking.


Q: Was there anything that you did not expect to find while researching this topic?

A: After doing this for 20 years, almost everything that we have discussed was a surprise to me - that most laughter is not about jokes but about (social) relationships, that men and women have different patterns of laughter, and that laugher is under little conscious control. If you ask someone to laugh, it's like asking them to cry. They can't do it.
My training is in developmental neuroscience, and how the brain works and develops. Having worked for years on the behavior of different animals, laughter provided an opportunity to look at human behavior in a way that is usually associated only with animal studies. People say that when you look at animal behaviors, you can see how the brain works without an overlay of society, culture and language. But if you want to look at some neurologically programmed behaviors (such as laughter), you don't need to reach out to animals - humans will do fine. Another behavior with the same properties is yawning. It is also a human universal, has a strong neurological foundation, and is also contagious.



LJ Anderson writes on health matters every Tuesday. She can be reached at lj.anderson@yahoo.com.