Breaking News: Why do we laugh? - News Paper

Thanks to loyal reader, Wendy Grossman for alerting me to this article in the Guardian about a study on laughter.
Scientific studies on why we laugh are always dicey, but some nuggets in the article did seem to ring true (even if I don’t know how they arrived at them). The author, Sophie Scott (who describes herself as a brain scientist) claims we are thirty times more likely to laugh if someone else is with us instead of being alone. I truly believe that. Laughter is contagious and that’s why seeing a play or movie with a big crowd is a much more fun experience.

It’s also why there are laugh tracks on network sitcoms. The idea is to simulate the experience of being in a laughing crowd. 

Two other points worth noting:

We laugh more than we think, especially if we’re engaged in conversation. Some of that is social laughter certainly, but still – seven laughs in ten minutes. (Although I can’t imagine laughing once in an hour with Mike Pence.)

The second point is that humans are supposedly not the only species that laugh. Apes, parrots, and even rats laugh. (Maybe that’s why our “Rat Girl” episode of CHEERS got such a great response the night it was filmed on an old soundstage at Paramount.)

But here’s where the article hits a speed bump.

To study laughter and the interaction of conversation, Ms. Scott plans to study the reaction to three stand up comics at a performance on May 2nd. The problem is simply this: If she did the same study every night for two weeks, with the same comics delivering the exact same material – she would get back fourteen very different results. There are so many factors involved in why and how energetic people laugh. The room temperature, the day of the week, the news that day, the demographics, different backgrounds of the audience, varying sensibilities, the weather, various biases – and that’s just for starters.

Without wiring people, I’ve seen this first hand with a number of my plays. Same actors, same performances, same jokes – wildly different results. Jokes that kill one night get nothing the next and straight lines get huge laughs the next evening.

To me the big question is how could 200 strangers independently laugh at something and the next night 200 other strangers independently not laugh at the same thing? Looking at averages you’d think between say 50-75% of any given audience would laugh at that joke; not 0-90%.

I wish her luck on her study. I’ll be interested to learn what she concludes. If nothing else, it might be good for a laugh.

from By Ken Levine http://bit.ly/2ICt27D
Breaking News: Why do we laugh? - News Paper