About Thumbs, Toes & Tears
And other traits that make us the strange and remarkable creatures we areCan you imagine ever falling in love with someone you have never laughed with? Can you imagine getting through a day without at least a titter, a chuckle, something that tickled you? And did you ever notice, you can never predict when you're about to laugh. In fact, the more surprising, the better the laugh. Why is that?
From Chapter 8 -"Howls, Hoots, and Calls"
Two cannibals are sitting beside a large fire after eating the best meal they have had in ages.
"Your wife sure makes a good roast," says the one cannibal.
"Yeah," replies the other, "I'm really going to miss her."
-- Anonymous
Laughter is one of the great mysteries of human behavior. It evades understanding and resists analysis, partly because it thoroughly combines the primal and the intellectual parts of us. Yet we barely acknowledge what an unusual behavior it is, mostly because it is so woven into the woof and weave of our lives. Like the noses on our faces and the lobes of our ears, it is familiar to the point of invisibility. Yet if it were suddenly plucked out of our existence, we would be lost because we use it constantly to send strange and mysterious signals to one another.
The social nature of laughter tells us that its origins are ancient and wordless, a behavior whose roots run a good deal deeper than the evolutionary wellsprings of language. It is related to play and feeling good although it isn't simply about fun. Darwin observed it can also show up when we are feeling anger, shame or nervousness, acting to mask, rather than display emotion. At other times it may communicate appeasement or submission. Or as Dante put it, "He is not always at ease who laughs."
The
social nature of laughter also makes it contagiousness. When someone laughs,
the rest of us almost always do the same. This is why Charles Douglass, a
television technician, invented the laugh track in 1953, and why it is
still effectively used today to make some sitcom jokes seem funnier than
they actually are. It is why, even when we watch total strangers laughing
about something that we know nothing about, we will involuntarily smile
or chuckle.
Maybe this explains laughter's universality. Everyone laughs, no matter where he lives, no matter what her race or background, whether he hunts corporate heads among the skyscrapers of Manhattan or real ones in the rain forests of Borneo. It sews us together as a species and as people. Along with big toes and thumbs and our oddly designed throats, it is one of those unique traits that distinguish us from the other animals.
Despite its familiarity and universality we are almost entirely clueless about how we have become a laughing creature. It is difficult business getting to the naked root of any human behavior, especially laughter, because of its ephemeral and elusive, nature. There is no obvious, practical reason for laughing. If evolution resolutely favors the emergence of the eminently practical, what possible reason could it serve? It's loud and calls attention to us -- not necessarily a good thing when avoiding carnivores on the savannah, or hunting mammoths on the tundra. And when we laugh we tend to lose control, as though our minds and bodies have been hijacked, also not a recommended survival technique. Nor is laughing at predators really a very good idea, at least not unless it is done well after the hunt, by a campfire, in a cave, far, far away.
In the crucible of evolution, behaviors also tend to become increasingly entwined in the traffic of other complex behaviors, and after a while it becomes maddeningly difficult to unravel one from the other. So we find it hard to know if laughs came before smiles or the other way around. Why one thing sounds funny while another looks funny? Or why laughter always surprises us? Understanding the origins of laughter requires a kind of psychological archeology that forces us to compare glimpses of some of our closest primate relatives to the careful observation of ourselves.
