Why do people laugh? You asked Google – and here’s the answer

Sophie Scott

People ask Google life’s hardest questions, and in this series our writers talk about the most frequently asked. Today’s may be nothing to do with jokes

‘Robert Provine has demonstrated that in the wild, laughter is a largely social behaviour, a way of making and maintaining social bonds.' Photograph: Evan Kafka/Getty

If you ask people why they laugh, they tend to talk about humour, comedy and jokes. Humour, comedy and jokes do seem to be very important to humans: as far as we can see, as long as humans have had language, we have had humour. Examples have been found from ancient Egypt, dated to 2600BC, and a comprehensive Roman joke book, The Laughter Lover, also still exists. Humour may be a constant for humans, but the precise nature of what we think is funny can change over time, and time has not been kind to the jokes from ancient history.
The ancient Egyptian joke goes: “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”

We laugh to show that we like people and that we agree with them, understand them, are part of the same group as them

A similarly bizarre sample from the Roman joke book reads: “A man from Abdera sees a recently crucified runner. ‘By the gods, now he really is flying,’ he says.” Can’t see a turn based on crucifixion going down hilariously nowadays, somehow. And though we like to rate jokes according to how funny they are or to try and find the funniest jokes more scientifically they can still be subject to changes in tastes and fashion, and the risk that someone might have personal reasons to find something deeply unfunny.
We typically link laughter and humour very profoundly, but the link may not be as close as we imagine. When I started working with laughter, as part of my work into vocal emotional expressions, I always used to refer to it as “amusement”. However, our lay understanding of laughter is not quite on the ball – while we do laugh at jokes and comedy, we laugh most in social situations.
Robert Provine has demonstrated that in the wild, laughter is a largely social behaviour, a way of making and maintaining social bonds. He has argued that though we associate our laughter with humour and jokes, in fact we laugh most when we’re talking to others, and in those conversations we are rarely laughing at jokes.

And laughter is hugely potentiated by the presence of other people – Provine has shown that we’re 30 times more likely to laugh when we are with someone else than when we are on our own. And we laugh to show that we like people – we might even love them – and that we agree with them, understand them, are part of the same group as them.
I was at a conference in the US a few weeks ago, with a largely American audience, and in a talk on speech production someone gave the example of saying the word “spot”, and then making that more complex by putting another word before it, and saying “toss spot”. I was sitting next to my student, Sophie Meekings, the only other British person I could see. We turned to each other, mouthed TOSS POT, and then dissolved into helpless laughter. If I had not been sitting next to someone I know and like, who also knew that tosspot has a more specific UK English meaning, I would probably not have screamed my way through my colleague’s talk so rudely.
So in a very real sense, I like to think this was Sophie Meekings’ fault.

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. ‘Laughter is hugely potentiated by the presence of other people – we’re 30 times more likely to laugh when we are with someone else than when we are on our own.’

In fact, Provine has pointed out that we often laugh simply because someone else is laughing. Laughter, like yawning, is behaviourally contagious, and we can catch it easily from other people, especially if we know them. There is a beautiful example here of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer laughing and making Matt Lucas laugh while he’s trying to sing. And of course a very famous example here of Brian Johnson and Jonathan Agnew trying to keep talking about cricket while howling with laughter (“Aggers! Do stop it!”).

We turned to each other, mouthed TOSS POT, and then dissolved into helpless laughter

It’s now becoming clear that though laughter is an essential social sign of affection and affiliation, it may be even more important than that. Research into couples has shown that people who deal with unpleasant, stressful situations with positive emotions like laughter not only feel immediately better, they are also happier in their relationships and stay together for longer. Laughter is a phenomenally useful way for people to regulate their emotions together – and feel better together. In this context, jokes and humour may form incredibly useful reasons to laugh together.
I certainly find myself saving things up to share with my partner – things I’ve heard or read or seen that I think are funny (like this or this) – as I know that I’ll laugh more at them if we read or hear or watch them together. The scientific studies suggest not only that laughing like this means I’ll laugh more, but also that it’s important that we’ll be laughing together, that we’ll be sharing our laughter. This almost certainly applies to anyone we are close to. Just before my father’s funeral started, I suddenly started telling my mum my favourite joke from the sitcom Porridge:

Fletcher: (sniffing) Dear me, what’s that smell?
Harris: Put me back on the pig farm, didn’t they?
Warren: I quite like the smell, Harris. Reminds me of home.
Fletcher: Born on a farm, was you?
Warren: No.

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‘I was just grabbing for something, anything, that my mum and I could laugh at. Together. It probably didn’t hurt that I thought of a programme, Porridge, we would all have watched together when I was a kid’.

At the time I thought well, this is odd, even by my standards, but I can see now I was just grabbing for something, anything, that my mum and I could laugh at. Together. It probably didn’t hurt that I thought of a programme we would all have watched together when I was a kid.
One last striking finding about laughter is that we are terrible at remembering that we’ve been doing it. We can often remember things we laughed at, or the people we were with, but we really do not notice how much we actually laugh. All studies that have asked people how often they laugh find that people wildly underestimate how often they laugh, and indeed if you observe people laughing, you’ll find that they always laugh more than they say they do. It’s almost as if we don’t notice a lot of the laughing we do, maybe because it’s such a basic aspect of our experience.
So in short, we do laugh because of humour and jokes, but we laugh mostly because of love and affection. We laugh to share meaning and understanding, to make ourselves feel better, to reaffirm relationships and to make new ones. It’s probably time to be taking our laughter more seriously.