Poking fun
Aug 4th 2005 | TUEBINGEN, GERMANY
From The Economist print edition
Why people laugh
THE true story of how your wife's stalker rang her to discuss killing you
isn't supposed to provoke mirth. But when John Morreall, of the College of
William and Mary in Virginia, related the events last week to a group of
scholars in Tuebingen in Germany, they were in stitches as he divulged the
details of how his wife tried to dissuade the confused young man by pleading
that her mortgage was too large to pay without her husband's help.
So why did they laugh? Dr Morreall's thesis is that laughter, incapacitating
as it can be, is a convincing signal that the danger has passed. The
reaction of the psychologists, linguists, philosophers and professional
clowns attending the Fifth International Summer School on Humour and
Laughter illustrates his point. Dr Morreall survived to tell the tale and so
had an easy time making it sound funny.
One description of how laughter is provoked is the incongruity theory
developed by Victor Raskin of Purdue University and Salvatore Attardo of
Youngstown State University, both in America. This theory says that all
written jokes and many other humorous situations are based on an
incongruity-something that is not quite right. In many jokes, the teller
sets up the story with this incongruity present and the punch line then
resolves it, in a way people do not expect. Alternatively, the very last
words of the story may introduce the absurdity and leave the listeners with
the task of reconciling it. For instance, many people find it funny that a
conference on humour could take place in Germany.
Why do people laugh at all? What is the point of it? Laughter is very
contagious and this suggests that it may have become a part of human
behaviour because it promotes social bonding. When a group of people laughs,
the message seems to be "relax, you are among friends".
Indeed, humour is one way of dealing with the fact that humans are
"excrement-producing poets and imperfect lovers", says Appletree Rodden of
the University of Tuebingen. He sees religion and humour as different, and
perhaps competing, ways for people to accept death and the general
unsatisfactoriness of the world. Perhaps that is why, as Dr Morreall
calculates in a forthcoming article in the journal Humor, 95% of the
writings that he sampled from important Christian scholars through the
centuries disapproved of humour, linking it to insincerity and idleness.
Fear of idleness is why many managers discourage laughter during office
hours, Dr Morreall notes. This is foolish, he claims. Laughter or its
absence may be the best clue a manager has about the work environment and
the mood of employees.
Indeed, another theory of why people laugh-the superiority theory-says that
people laugh to assert that they are on a level equal to or higher than
those around them. Research has shown that bosses tend to crack more jokes
than do their employees. Women laugh much more in the presence of men, and
men generally tell more jokes in the presence of women. Men have even been
shown to laugh much more quietly around women, while laughing louder when in
a group of men.
But laughter does not unite us all. There are those who have a pathological
fear that others will laugh at them. Sufferers avoid situations where there
will be laughter, which means most places where people meet. Willibald Ruch
of Zurich University surveyed 1,000 Germans and asked them whether they
thought they were the butts of jokes and found that almost 10% felt this
way. These people also tended to classify taped laughter as jeering. Future
research will focus on the hypothesis that there is something seriously
wrong with their sense of humour.
source:
www.economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4246393