Play. (part 6)
Human beings are very creative creatures, and rather than let this strange instinct remain dormant until nature presents an occasion that makes it relevant, we tinker and prod at it and recreate the conditions of the stimulus so that we can experience the same response.
The things that children do for the sake of a laugh are kind of unsettling to think about. As an adult, they’d probably say there’s something wrong with you if you took pleasure in chasing people down the street. Perhaps even more so if you fancied other people chasing you. If someone tackled you to the ground and wrestled you, or if you were picked up by someone and thrown into the air, or if you found yourself in some situation where you were forced to dangle from a metal bar, it might go down as one of the most eventful days of your life. But for children these are just the stuff of ordinary schoolyard play.
Even simple games like tickling and peek-a-boo are not as benign as they might seem. Psychologists have long remarked that children see tickling as a playful attack and peek-a-boo as a gentle startle. This means that while you think it’s cute to see a baby’s first giggles, he might be getting some sort of perverse thrill at seeing you try to terrorize him.
You probably don’t really need any additional incentive to do things that bring about laughter. It feels good to laugh and make others laugh. It improves relationships and makes people like you more. But there are also other advantages. Creating humor allows you an opportunity to tune the comic instrument. It gives you practice finding the funny. It lets you exercise the muscle that distinguishes serious situations from non-serious ones. When you recognize sarcasm you sharpen your ability to pick out information that shouldn’t be accepted at face value. When you receive a little gentle teasing, you develop your ability to recognize the situations that are not worth getting worked up over. If you were not able to practice your humor instinct, but instead had to wait for humorous moments to pop up before you could refine your comic sensibilities, you wouldn’t learn about the most effective uses of a sense of humor until after it’s too late. You would risk getting embroiled in awkward confrontational situations and only later realizing they were harmless, whereas a nimble and well practiced sense of humor would allow you to navigate these situations with more clarity.
Also, because humor is largely a social instinct that helps you interact with other people, a fully honed sense of humor is not something you can develop alone in isolation. You need to learn certain things about the people around you if your sense of humor is going to be well adapted to your environment. You need to know how to read other people and where to draw the line between playful teases and harmful insults. You need to know what particular social conventions are permissible to break and in what circumstances. You need to know the traits and behaviors that are most esteemed by the group and when they fall in and out of fashion. You need to know where everyone falls in the social pecking order and how and when to avoid disrupting the entrenched social hierarchy. By trading jokes and participating in playful exchanges, we are engaging in a constant process of interactive cultural transmission.
Humans are not unique in our tendency to use play to calibrate our aggressions to our social environment. There are animal studies that suggest that animals who are not exposed to playful mock stresses when they are younger lose their ability to appropriately handle legitimate stresses when they are older. When some animals are deprived of the opportunity to play with each other, they lose their ability to have constructive social interactions. They lose their ability to distinguish between stressful and peaceful situations. They are unable to tell if their peers are trying to hurt them or not.
There is also a great potential for laughter and play to help us develop other instincts. Max Eastman suggested that by giving a sense of enjoyment to playful aggressions, laughter would entice children to participate in the kinds of activities that would allow them to develop their defensive skills. He built upon the work of 19th century thinkers like Charles Darwin and Karl Groos, who agreed that laughter allowed us to communicate to each other that these mock attacks are nothing to worry about. They believed that laughter would grant permission to continue with such playful activities by confirming that no actual harm has been done. By helping to establish that a situation is not serious, laughter would facilitate the creation of a safe, consequence-free environment in which children could engage in developmental activities without fear of escalating into actual conflict.
This carefree sense of safety is reinforced on a chemical level by laughter’s facilitation of the release of endogenous opioids. One of nature’s ways of encouraging us to continue with certain activities, like socializing or taking care of our offspring, opioids have the power to interrupt our fear circuitry so that we overlook some of the signs of threat presented by a given stimulus.
Laughter’s ability to establish that a certain situation is not consequential has far reaching potential. It allows a space for one to learn by trial and error. It offers the opportunity to gain all the benefits of having an experience without suffering any of the costs. For example, you could play fight with a friend and learn a new set of grappling techniques without registering your friend as a threat the same way you would an opponent in a real life, dangerous situation. Establishing a temporary respite from consequences allows a space to incubate new ideas and gauge the responses they invoke, and to adapt one’s instincts to the environment.