Maybe we should look around and see if we can’t find a back door. (part 3)
We know that some things are best known by looking to their opposite, and in the same way that studying heat helps us to better understand the cold, so too might we better understand humor by looking instead to what it is not.
One can say without too much controversy that there is something about humor that stands opposite to seriousness. Things said in jest are not taken to be literal pieces of information meant to be factored into any decision making process. They are not expected to carry any impact. Serious information, on the other hand, carries with it a sense of urgency. It is considered worthy of one’s full attention and is expected to impose significant consequences. Maybe if we look at these serious, consequential matters of life, we might be able to trace ourselves back to a better understanding of the frivolous. Bertrand Russell once said that “the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it,” so by his reasoning we have a solid beginning to our adventure.
As a thought experiment, let’s begin by imagining a stimulus we would treat with absolute seriousness. A little gunfire might do it. Or maybe some muffled cries for help coming from the basement, or any other situation that provokes that heart-pounding, palm-soaking, so-this-is-how-I-die sensation pumping into the bloodstream in the form of adrenaline and other stress hormones.
In such a situation, the body initiates a series of actions that prepare it to handle danger. Breathing shifts from slow, deep breaths in the belly to quicker, shallow breaths higher up in the chest. Thoughts race and the body’s machinery is put into high gear by our fight-or-flight response.
But then, let’s say that after all these bodily actions have been taken, you make the discovery that the signal which originally gave you a fright were really nothing to worry about. You see something that tells you this is really not your problem and makes you feel you can go along with the rest of your boring day. Maybe you discover that the “gunfire” you thought you heard was actually just a show of fireworks, or that the “child you heard crying for help in the basement” was not in any way related to you.
This might be a situation where a laughter mechanism is well suited. A number of thinkers have said in one way or another that the quintessential comic epiphany occurs when you realize you’ve taken something more seriously than you should have.
Max Eastman, paraphrasing Plato, suggested that laughter arises from something that is expected to cause pain but which somehow causes pleasure.
English philosopher Herbert Spencer believed that laughter occurs when we realize we’ve been deceived into triggering more nervous arousal than necessary. He believed that throughout our life, our body summons nervous energy to accomplish whatever it needs to do, and that every now and again when we discover that we’ve summoned more energy than necessary, we release that excess energy through laughter. Spencer’s portrait of laughter is often likened to a sort of relief valve that makes sure there isn’t too much energy built up to solve a problem that isn’t really there. All nervous energy needs to go somewhere, Spencer reckoned, and most of the time it is channeled toward some sort of action. Laughter, he noted, was the only emotion not tied to any action.
Sigmund Freud later developed this theory into a more sophisticated one which accommodated his theories of the unconscious. He believed that a joke tricks us into summoning unconscious intellectual and emotional resources, and that when we realize the premise of the joke was a farce, we release those unconscious energies in order to return to equilibrium.
These theories are mired in antiquated ideas about the brain and nervous system, but we can salvage from them a simple and straightforward model of humor. First, there are some indications that signal the expectation of an emotionally compelling situation. Second, the body summons the resources necessary to handle such a situation. Third, an epiphany arises, illustrating those expectations were unfounded. And finally, the tension is released through laughter.
It is often said that humor requires an element of surprise. But in one way, this epiphany is the inverse of what we normally think of as a surprise. With a typical surprise, you are going about your day, minding your own business, and then something suddenly jumps to your attention. But in a humorous situation as Spencer and Freud would describe it, the order of emotions is reversed: you begin in a state of anticipation, with your attention fixed intensely on a situation, and then something happens to make that sense of anticipation vanish. A surprise happens when a state lacking any expectation explodes into something, whereas a laugh happens when, as Immanuel Kant once said, a strained expectation about something fizzles into nothing. If a surprise is necessary for a laugh, Spencer might have said it’s only necessary in order to wind up a person so that they can later laugh when they discover they were startled under false pretenses.
From a neurological perspective, modern observations about laughter’s effect on the nervous system are more or less in line with the suggestions made by Spencer and Freud. During a laugh, there is a sudden and transient burst of sympathetic (fight-or-flight) nervous arousal, followed by a sharp vagal rebound, a quick return to equilibrium marked by an uptick in activity of the parasympathetic nervous system, our neurological machinery most closely related to relaxation.
Contrary to the sympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system inhibits many of our defensive responses and is responsible for our “feed-and-breed” or “rest-and-digest” activities. It is interesting to note that parasympathetic activity can at times stimulate tear secretion and empty the bladder and bowels, which might help explain some of the more bizarre accompaniments to hearty laughter.
From a physiological perspective, you might say the traits of a laugh are opposite those of a gasp—perhaps making it a half-sibling of the sigh. With a gasp we experience a sudden inhalation at the onset of some astonishment, whereas during a sigh or a laugh we experience a strong exhalation at some relief.
While gasping has been observed to elevate a person’s blood pressure and activate one’s fight-or-flight response, a sigh is believed to reset a person’s breathing and heart rate patterns back to a normal rhythm and to mitigate whatever emotional arousal came out of the initial stress.
These behaviors adjust the nervous system’s metronome, either at the onset of or at a break from some stress, so by comparison, the Spencerian view might be that laughter helps us reset the nervous system’s metronome after we realize an arousing trigger turned out to be nothing to get worked up over.
The notion that laughter serves to relieve a person's excess nervous tension is one that has received support from many prominent thinkers throughout history. But where an explanation like this falls short is in its failure to account for why a relaxation response would need to be so noisy. The sound of laughter is completely ridiculous for being just a relaxation mechanism. You would think that a physiological response that has something to do with aggression and a perceived threat of danger would err on the side of caution and be as quiet as possible.
Evidently the benefits of laughter drawing attention to itself must have outweighed the costs.
Occasionally in nature if there is an advantage to be gained by making others in the area aware of a particular behavior or trait, it will be embellished to be made more noticeable. Sometimes it will be exaggerated to the extent that its value as a means of expression can become more important than the purpose of the original behavior.
For example, a wild dog facing an adversary might pull the corners of his mouth back from his teeth in order to make it easier for him to bite, inadvertently displaying his sharp fangs. Because this behavior anticipates something very serious, it has the potential to carry great weight as a social signal. Any animal that recognizes the predictive power of this behavior stands to gain an advantage. Those animals that recognize this snarl as a display of aggression—and thus exhibit suitable caution—will reduce their risk of unnecessary harm. In turn, a dog with an expressive snarl will be rewarded for being more intimidating. Eventually, as the sender and receiver adapt to recognize the message encoded in this signal, dogs will develop the instinct to articulate their snarl as ostentatiously as possible when they want to express their aggression. By this point, the communicative value outweighs whatever preparatory value the behavior originally had.
Similarly, cranes open their wings and flap them around before they fly in order to shake out dirt and straighten out their feathers. At some point, it became recognized that wing-flapping was a reliable predictor of flight, and over the course of many generations, cranes developed the instinct to flap their wings in an exaggerated and prolonged fashion in order to send a message to the group that it’s time to fly. This ability to announce one’s private state to the group furthers the group’s ability to work together.
A similar sort of evolution likely occurred with regard to laughter. The muscles responsible for the vocalization of laughter are intimately involved with the maintenance and regulation of our emotional state, making it feasible for the byproducts of a relaxation response to be developed into a communication signal.
The characteristic bursts of exhalation that occur during a laugh are produced in large part by contractions of the diaphragm. The diaphragm’s primary function is to push air out of the lungs during respiration, but it has also been observed since antiquity to have a strong effect on our emotional state. Much of this emotional modulation is carried out by information exchanges between the diaphragm and brain by way of mechanoreceptors and chemoreceptors. The observed effect that diaphragmatic activity has on our nervous system is the basis for many types of meditation and deep breathing exercises.
The reason these bursts of exhalation have a distinct vocal quality is due to the fact that they are accompanied by innervations of the larynx. Originally a muscle that helped us keep water and food out of the lungs, somewhere along the way our ancestors developed the ability to maneuver the larynx in such a way so that air passing up the windpipe would make distinct sounds, thus setting the course for basic respiratory activities to be articulated into meaningful vocal signals.
Those best able to accentuate these rumblings of the diaphragm and larynx likely gained an advantage by being able to broadcast information about their internal state in a way that might disarm their peers. Likewise, those best able to read these expressions as an indication of nonaggression likely gained an advantage by identifying and form relationships with those least likely to cause them harm.
It’s worth noting that a laugh also produces a variety of other indications that a person is not prepared to engage in hostile activities. In many ways it’s the opposite of a flex. Instead of tensing the muscles so they’re ready for exertion or so that you can intimidate your opponent, when you laugh, your muscles fall slack and conspicuously unprepared for any kind of defensive response. Instead of gritting your teeth so that your jaw is prepared to handle impact, during laughter, your mouth is relaxed into an open position, leaving one of the body’s most vulnerable points of contact unprotected from attack.
The indication that you’ve let your guard down could have several implications. It could act as an insult, to taunt someone as if to say “I’m not alarmed because I don’t consider you a legitimate threat." It could also serve as a gesture of cordiality. A way of saying “I’m lowering my defenses around you because I understand you mean no harm.”
You could argue that there are benefits to being able to convey to someone that you’re not preparing to attack them. It stands to reason that a man who can disarm the aggressions of other people would be able to survive longer than a man who cannot. On a grander scale, it follows that a group that can collectively manage its aggressions and reduce risks of internal conflict would be much more productive than one that cannot. Henri Bergson once remarked that laughter hardly ever occurs without the company of other people, which strongly suggests that one of its primary purposes is to serve as a vehicle for social communication.
The idea that laughter functions as some sort of safety signal is one that has been repeated many times throughout the course of history. Darwin and his contemporaries suggested that a signal to indicate the harmlessness of certain threats would be useful in facilitating play in children. In the early 20th century, Donald Hayworth proposed that laughter could have been a way for our ancestors to announce that some danger had passed, or that it was not as harmful as we’d expected it to be. Using a similar line of reasoning, Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran would later call laughter a “false alarm” signal.
These interpretations suggest that laughter’s function is more or less opposite that of a scream. It’s not a terribly outlandish notion, considering how opposite the feelings associated with laughs and screams are. Darwin observed that the vocal patterns of laughter and screaming contrasted as well. During a scream, our exhalations are long and continuous, and our inhalations are short and interrupted, while the exact opposite is true for laughter.
The acoustic traits of laughs and screams are quite different too. A scream is sustained, whereas a laugh is broken up. A scream maintains a constant pitch, whereas the pitch of a laugh will fluctuate. A scream has indistinct onsets and offsets. It slips out of the air and then fades off. Laughter is much more textured. It comes as a collection of colorful rhythmic bursts, punctuated by jagged, staccato edges.
The straightforward, streamlined structure of a scream likely helps it convey a sense of urgency more efficiently without risking giving up too much information, while the ornate, fanciful nature of a laugh allows it to carry a wealth of information about who and where it’s coming from. This makes laughter especially valuable as a social signal, as it takes a great deal of nuanced information exchange in order for social cooperation to be effective.
You could probably invent dozens of new ways of laughing by switching up the pacing, or the number and length of intervals, or how quickly the tones flutter. Each of these different ways of laughing would paint a different portrait of a person. But if you wanted to improvise new screams, your options would be much more limited.
If you closed your eyes and heard a laugh in the other room, you’d immediately be able to tell all sorts of things about the person laughing. You’d be able to pick out little subtleties about their status or their mood or their health. But if you’d heard a scream in the other room, you’d know very little about the person except that they’re in distress.
In 1955, Peter Marler suggested that the structure of an animal call could play a role in helping it achieve its function. He suggested that because many alarm calls tend to be long in duration, maintain a consistent pitch, and have indistinct onsets and offsets, they have the effect of making it very difficult for listeners to determine where they’re coming from.
The reason for this is because one of the ways our brain figures out where a sound is coming from is by comparing how it sounds in each ear. If a sound is a little louder in one ear, or if a sound is heard slightly earlier in one ear than another, our brains will measure this small difference and be able to roughly calculate the distance and direction to the sound source. It is harder to pick up on these differences if each ear is bombarded by an identical tone for a sustained period of time. Marler hypothesized that if an alarm sound were hard to localize, it would allow an animal to alert his peers of danger without giving up his specific location to enemies. If he is successful at convincing his peers that there is danger in the vicinity, they might scatter, creating a distraction for the predator that might allow for an escape.
Contrary to this, Marler noticed, calls which are segmented into fragments and which have more pitch complexity are much easier to localize. It is much easier for the brain to pick out specific differences between how a sound is received in each ear when the sound is more textured.
While simple, inconspicuous signals are fit to convince others in the area to scatter, ostentatious, easy to locate signals are naturally suited to convince others to gather, which might contribute to the fact that laughter so often accompanies behaviors that occur when people collect together, like courtship, fraternization, and parent-offspring interactions.
Furthermore, because laughter carries all the risks that come with making one’s location publicly available, when a person laughs, he isn’t just suggesting that a scene is free from risk, he’s providing reliable, falsifiable evidence. By drawing attention to himself, he makes himself the easiest target of the group, which demonstrates that he has something to lose if he is incorrect about his assertion of safety.