The Science of Laughter

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Hello there, and welcome.

Thank you for downloading this podcast of BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

We're recording this in front of an audience at Hay Festival's winter weekend.

Say hello, audience!

Now, the audience here today represent the pinnacle of culture and sophistication.

So, I'm running a little test past you.

I have the scientifically tested funniest joke ever.

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground.

He doesn't seem to be breathing.

His eyes are rolled back in his head.

His friend panics and pulls out his phone and phones the emergency service.

He gasps to the operator, my friend is dead.

What can I do?

The operator, in a calm, soothing voice says, just take it easy.

I can help.

First, let's make sure he's dead.

There's a brief silence followed by a gunshot.

The guy's voice comes back on the line.

He says, okay, now what?

It's good.

Good laughter, thank you.

So we got some chuckles.

We're going to figure out today what that strange noise is that just came out of your mouths because today's show is all about the science of laughter.

So, joining us today, we have an expert in making people laugh, actor, comedian, radio for regular Miles Chupp.

Give him a cheer.

Hooray!

And because this is a science show, we have the world's foremost expert in laughter, neuroscientist, and also part-time stand-up Professor Sophie Scott from University College London.

Miles, this is a science show.

Can I check?

Do you you have any kind of credentials?

Yeah, I used to be an associate professor of psychiatry at UCL.

Oh, wow.

No, I'm joking.

I've got a science GCSE, a sort of double thing.

I can't remember.

So, no, I'm a bit of an amateur in that sense.

I have had brain surgery performed upon me, so fan of science.

In that sense, there must have been some science involved in that.

But basically,

I'm a lay person.

And Sophie, you've spent years studying laughter.

Is there any reason why you got the researching comedy bug?

It's going to sound silly, but I started studying laughter just because I thought I was looking at vocal emotions.

But actually, it's exceptionally complex vocal behaviour that we engage in.

So we think, oh, you know, we're laughing because it's something's funny.

But actually, there are so many different reasons why humans laugh.

We laugh just because we're with people, we like them, we're communicating with them.

Most laughter happens in conversations.

And we'll use laughter to mask emotions.

And we'll use laughter to deal with stressful situations.

And we'll use laughter to try and de-escalate situations.

It's like a hall of mirrors.

It's exceptionally complex human behaviour.

And there are so many aspects to laughter that we're going to dig into: the social, the behavioural, the evolutionary.

First, let's get physical.

Miles, I need you at this point.

I imagine one of the worst things that happens when you say you're a comedian is someone goes, go on then, tell us a joke.

Yes, it's awful.

So, at this moment,

I'm going to make you relive that.

Not for me, for science.

Can we squeeze out some chuckles from this audience?

In the name of science, this is a joke almost all communities here now when they're told, say, tell us a joke, say, this is a joke that Barry Cryer told me.

It's sort of like Q for the Bible.

He's the sort of original source.

So that's a very niche reference.

There's a man, he's at a job interview, and the job interviewee says to him, So what would you say is your biggest weakness?

And the interviewee says, I think my biggest weakness is that I'm very honest.

And the interviewer says, I don't think that's a weakness.

And the interviewer says, I don't give a stuff what you think.

You can fill in your own version of

stuff, obviously.

Perfectly done.

Thank you so much.

Sophie, what was just happening inside our audience to produce that beautiful laughter?

Laughter is more like a different way of breathing than it is a different way of speaking.

So breathing is very important.

You're all doing it right now to do what we scientists call staying alive.

When you start laughing, the muscles between your ribs, the intercostal muscles, they start to move in very distinctive ways.

They do really big single contractions.

So each ha ha ha sound is just one big squeezing air out of you that's going on, almost like a kind of concertina in your rib cage.

And it generates very strange forces.

You start making very peculiar noises when you're laughing because of the way your air is just being squeezed out of you.

And it's not just a muscular workout.

There's something chemical going on there too, right?

There is, there's quite a lot of changes in your body and your brain chemically when you're laughing and after you've been laughing.

So the first one, which happens really quickly, is that you have a reduction in adrenaline, and adrenaline is the body's fight or flight hormone.

So if something scares you and you get that kind of boost feeling, that's adrenaline at work.

And as soon as you start laughing, your adrenaline levels start to drop really quickly.

And that means that if you, for example, measure your, as I like to do, you measure your heart rate before you're laughing

and then you measure it again after you've been laughing what you'll find is your heart rate afterwards is slower because that's that very quick reduction in adrenaline there's also an effect of cortisol so cortisol is the the stress hormone it's a more sluggish response than adrenaline but when you've been laughing you get a reduction in levels of cortisol so you are more relaxed, you are less stressed, and you also get an increase in the body's uptake of its naturally circulating painkillers, and those are endorphins.

And that's the same sort of thing you would get after doing some exercise but you're not doing very much work when you're laughing but you still seem to get that same bump and that gives you a nice warm feeling when you've been laughing and it also means you can tolerate more pain when you've been laughing because you've already got this painkiller in action.

Wow, so rather than do some exercise I could watch videos in my bed of cats falling off mantelpieces

and I'd get a reduction that would technically counter stress management.

It would, it would, as long as it made you laugh.

What about different laughs?

Do we have different laughs for different situations?

You do have two different kinds of laughs.

If you think about the last time you were laughing and you could not stop, you might have been in a situation where

you shouldn't have been laughing.

But that kind of helpless laughter, that is a spontaneous expression of emotion and you can't stop it once it's starting.

It sort of feels like it's just being torn from you.

And it seems to come from a really old part of the brain, which is responsible for controlling how all mammals vocalize and then there's laughter most of the laughter you encounter day to day which is much more sort of social and often communicative and which is at some level under more kind of volitional control and by that I don't mean you're thinking hmm I will laugh now ha ha ha it's more that it's part of this whole kind of world of communicative laughter and that seems to be something that for example it can start and stop really quickly so it's not like the helpless laughter although it's not normally sort of horrible and negative it's normally well-meant Is it real laughter, though, that sort of

laughter?

As someone that's once hosted a Radio 4 panel show, I became very adept at polite laughing.

And just to sort of help the evening along, really.

But is that real?

Is it giving you any of the same benefits?

It is absolutely real.

If people don't want to laugh, they won't.

So it's generally coming from a...

a desire to sort of express things with the laughter.

If you think about this, when you're talking, you actually have volitional control over your articulators, but you're not thinking now I will make a sound with my lips.

You're sort of thinking of the message, and then all these unconscious parts of your brain are driving the actual volitional use of the muscles.

And that's the same with laughter, I think.

So you're thinking, I'm seeing that that was meant to be funny, I'm enjoying this, this is a person I like.

I'm not saying it's all fake.

Have you ever done stand-up miles and seen someone who looked like they really weren't going to laugh?

And you and you thought, right.

Seems unlikely but very much so do you do you then go right I'm gonna I'm gonna get you I'm gonna make you laugh I have the power it's not a super power sadly so but it does it can make you sort of slightly gladiatorial and that sort of arms folded come on then thing is it does sort of that's I don't know what bit of you in the deep recesses of your brain that sort of angers I remember going on a jungler's battery quite late one night and someone I hadn't even gotten to the microphone and this man in the front room went are you funny sort of like that and I just did my normal thing but I must have just done it with a certain certain amount of zip.

And I had a really, really good gig, I'm afraid.

And I should have enjoyed it, but actually, I just got to the end and I had this lovely response from the audience.

And then they went to him, there, was that funny?

Is that what you mean?

And then left the stage for that.

Rather than, you've been absolutely lovely.

Thank you for the rich indeed.

Please do it.

You've been a lovely audience, apart from you.

It was actually driven by anger.

We have a couple of examples of two types of laughter, and I thought I might test the audience at this point to see if you can tell the difference between spontaneous and slightly more kind of forced.

So, here's the first one.

And here is the second one.

Clap if you thought the first laugh was the spontaneous one.

And clap if you thought the second one was the spontaneous one.

Yep, you're good.

You're good.

It was the second laugh.

Sophie, are we really good at telling the difference?

We are good at telling the difference.

Interestingly, though, it's something we get better at with age.

So if you play those laughs to children, they go, what are you talking about?

I can hear somebody laughing.

And then by the time you're in your teens you're good at spotting the spontaneous laughs those sort of authentic laughs by the time you're old enough to go to literary festivals you're just

so sharp on it

so basically what we're saying here is that you are at your peak because of that ability that's what I meant small children don't have it it is certainly the case that you by the time you don't actually get good at it till you're in your 30s and actually then you stay pretty good and that's pretty impressive most things in life don't work like that.

So

any fool can laugh but it takes decades of wisdom and sophistication to learn to distinguish the different types.

Miles, can you remember how old your children were when you first made them laugh?

Honestly, no.

You didn't do some witty political satire on them.

Yeah, just a load of put-downs.

Where are you from, mate?

Yeah.

What do you do for a living, do you?

But probably, I mean,

probably quite quite young.

It comes in around three months.

Three months.

Interestingly, if we were born to term, so all human babies are born too early, they start laughing around the time they would laugh if they were born.

So they're around three months old.

But that would be an inappropriate response, wouldn't it?

Just been through the stress of childbirth, and the first thing your child does is laugh at you.

That would seem

absolutely brutal, I would say.

But in a charming, bonding way.

Exactly.

Sophie, why did we evolve to laugh?

It feels like an evolved response.

It is an evolved response.

We are not the only animals that laugh.

You find laughter in other apes.

Obviously, we're apes, so that's not too surprising, but it's also been well described in rats.

Rats is surprising.

Rats is surprising.

Is it a laugh or a cackle?

It's.

Well, it doesn't sound like a laugh.

It's a wheeze.

It sounds like a sort of chirrup sound.

So I'm going to do this because I impersonate it so well.

In other apes,

gorillas can do a kind of

sound, and in chimpanzees, it goes a bit more like mutley, so

sound.

And it's called the play grunt, because that's also the sound they make when they're playing.

And the same is true for rats.

The rats make the sound when they're playing, and they also make the sound when you tickle them.

And if you get the rat used to being tickled, it will make the sound when it sees you come into the lab in the morning, which nobody normally is that happy to see a scientist, so that's nice.

Can you do the rat noise?

No, it's a really high-pitched chirrup.

I'm afraid it's

not.

You could hear this, were you a rat, is not really

what you're looking for.

Any rats in the audience?

This is really bad.

This is making me like rats.

Well, okay, I'm going to make it worse for you.

Some scientists in Germany taught rats to play hide and seek.

Oh.

And the rats would stay silent when they were hiding, and then they would laugh when they were found.

It's going to be one of those situations where we find it in all of the animals that we never bothered to to look at.

Exactly.

No one was looking for it, and it probably turns out that it's everywhere.

Well, it may be limited to vertebrates, okay?

Because you find it in mammals, but it has been described.

There's a play vocalisation that you find in these New Zealand parrots.

They're very social.

They hang out in flocks and they play, and they have a distinct play vocalisation associated with that.

So it may not just be mammals.

So social is the key.

Social seems to be the key, yeah.

Are there any other animals that we don't like that turn out to be really good fun, actually?

If only we could get to know them properly.

But rats are probably deadpan, aren't they?

We didn't really realise that, but that's kind of their stock in trade.

Wherever they looked for it in the mammals, you were finding it.

And as I say, because all mammals play.

If you showed cats YouTube videos of humans

falling over, would they find it funny getting their heads stuck in fish bowls?

Would that?

Well, it does seem that for other animals to laugh, they need to have that physical element of play.

You only find humour in humans.

So that kind of laughing at something on a screen only seems to work for humans.

That's interesting.

So, we have a sophisticated sense of humour, whereas chimpanzees just kind of like person hit with plank.

They don't even like person hit with plank.

It's a classic, though.

They do not.

There's lots and lots of examples of

laughter, say, in other apes.

But they don't even laugh contagiously.

So, often when we laugh, it's just because we caught it from somebody else.

Although contagious behaviours are very common in nature, we are the only animal that laughs contagiously.

Like laughter can jump the gap between us.

And I wonder if that's one of the bases for humour, because so you can have two chimpanzees playing and laughing helplessly.

That's say it's it's me and Marnie, and then the third chimpanzee sitting right here

isn't laughing at all.

So Miles is just sitting there glumly.

Whereas humans would be joining in with the laughter.

If we all knew each other, that there would be laughter happening there.

And nobody's ever described anything that you find in nature that looks like humour in other animals, even in other primates.

The closest you get is teasing.

So, why have we got this unique sense of humour?

I think it's because it's a way of play, but it's play that we do in adulthood.

You don't have to sort of chase each other around and tickle each other to get laughter going.

We can get laughter going at a distance.

It's a way of intentionally causing other people to laugh with thoughts in their mind rather than with physical actions from you upon their body.

So, playful without getting HR involved.

Exactly.

You're listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton, comedian Miles Jupp, and neuroscientist Sophie Scott.

Hey, festival winter weekend audience, give yourself a cheer.

We've been digging into the science of laughter.

We've learnt that laughter is more than just an exhalation of air.

It's also a rush of endorphins.

Rats love it as much as we do, and it's both a sophisticated behaviour and a basic instinct shared by social animals that value play.

There is one big claim about laughter that we still need to address, which is that it's good for your health.

So, Miles, as someone who recently had brain surgery, is laughter the best medicine?

No, it's homeopathy.

A tiny bit of surgery.

A tiny,

and it has a huge effect.

Yeah, yeah, a little bit of surgery, and then the surgeon says to your brain, I mean, you get the gist.

It's just more about that.

No, I would, I mean, laughter is very helpful.

I mean it's very you know it's very cathartic isn't it?

And as you said the idea of you know relieving stress.

But I I know I a big fan of proper science I think in terms of actual actual medicine.

It was it was I I sought out the help of neurosurgeons not other comedians for instance.

Guys let's workshop this.

What should we do about my benign tumour?

So Sophie is is laughter any kind of medicine?

It it definitely is something that can help with pain.

So we saw within you get this a raised level of the uptake of endorphins in your body.

and you do also get an increased production of human growth hormone, very important when you're a baby and a child because it's helping your body grow.

Doesn't stop being important once you're an adult because it's involved in your immune system.

Now,

don't run away with this information, as Miles said.

Turn to medical science first, but it certainly is giving us some kind of potential link for there to be a relationship between laughter and better health.

I think the problem with this is it's really, really hard to test.

One thing that we know from science is that everybody, everybody is wrong about how much they think they laugh.

Everybody laughs more than they think they do.

How could I actually show that people who laugh more, for example, suffer less illness if there's almost no relationship between how much people tell you they laugh and how much they are laughing?

There is one activity that tries to separate laughter from its natural social setting, And it's called laughter yoga.

Has anyone heard of that?

Yes.

Yes.

So practitioners of laughter yoga claim it can decrease stress, increase cognitive function and even extend your life.

Oh audience, what have you signed up for?

So this all sounds deeply un-British, but should we give it a go anyway?

Miles, I'm going to make you do this because it's so awkward that it needs a professional in charge.

Shall I squat down or

how do we get to do this?

Oh, it's all kicking off.

Absolute chaos.

Okay, so what we're going to do, firstly, I can ask you if you're able to or you're inclined to, would you stand?

That's the first bit of this laughter yoga subject.

All I know about laughter yoga is what I've read on a printed piece of A4.

So

let's see how this goes.

So we'll raise our hands in the air.

Okay,

we'll take a deep breath.

And then as you lower your hands slowly, also laugh.

It's terrifying the way you're all doing it.

Okay, we'll do it slightly differently.

This time we're going to put our hands up, we'll take the deep breath, and then this time we're going to wave and shake our hands around as we laugh, okay?

And again,

how absolutely chilling.

Okay, yeah, that is as much of that as I'm going to attempt at the moment, Marnie.

But let's see what effect it's had on people.

Thank you.

Oh,

thank you.

You were clearly finding that excruciating, Sophie Scott.

I cope badly with laughter yoga.

Please do not write to me, laughter yoga therapists.

I think we've established this.

So, in a completely unscientific way, anyone feel that's extended their lifespan.

Give me a cheer if you feel a little bit better than you did before.

Not quite a bit.

It wasn't really a cheer.

It was more of a.

That'll do it.

It feels more appropriate, I think.

Give me one of those.

If you feel no better,

but you feel quite a lot more awkward.

Miles, how did that make you feel?

Well, I love the attention.

Just the actual stretching and breathing.

In that sense, it feels better.

I'm sure what you'd say is allowing your chi to move freely around your body.

Is that what you'd say, Sophie?

Is it?

I'm afraid it's not, but it's definitely...

It's what you mean, Sophie.

Scientifically proven.

What is going on with that?

Laughter yoga works on the principle that laughter is contagious.

So if you want people laughing, they'll laugh more once you've got them laughing.

So for people for whom laughter yoga works, that's that contagion absolutely at play.

And a lot of people really get a great deal out of it, and then there's some people who don't.

And interestingly, that's true of all kind of

human-constructed environments where we kind of aim to get laughter to happen.

So, it seems impossible to me, but I have friends who don't enjoy stand-up comedy, and it's not the comedians, they just don't like that environment.

And there are people who don't like clowns, and there are people who don't like fast, all sorts of different situations where we've kind of thought now it's appropriate to laugh.

There'll be somebody going, mm-mm, not for me.

Yeah, my ex said there's nothing more depressing than knowing you've paid to sit in a dark room and have someone try and make you laugh, which is bleak.

I stopped taking him to gigs.

So

there's been a lot of talk about laughter and the goodness that you get from laughter.

Is it ever dangerous?

Yes.

So you do do quite a lot of work within your thoracic cavity, which is what's inside your rib cage, you raise the pressure in there quite a lot while you're actually laughing because you're generating really quite big forces and it's squeezing the rib cage in.

And if you are what the medical profession term

compromised in a cardiovascular sense, that means the heart and lungs and blood vessels, it can be a little bit more dangerous.

So, for example, when I was a kid, there was a television program called The Goodies.

One of their episodes, like there was front-page news the next day because a man had died watching The Goodies.

He'd laughed so so hard.

He was laughing and laughing and laughing and then he just died.

The goodies were really upset about it and his wife wrote to them and said, look, my last memory is of him laughing.

Please don't feel bad that you killed my husband.

So it is, it does happen.

Rarely.

Don't stop laughing.

Probably more important that you laugh.

I'm terrified of this, in a way.

I mean, when I start to go, oh my god, I go for ages.

I've absolutely ruined jobs because I just can't.

I almost got cut from a Mr.

Bean sketch.

So, yeah, it's quite frightening.

Can I I just ask, is there anybody else in your family that laughs like that?

Did you have a parent that laughed like that or another sibling?

Yeah, actually, yeah, yeah.

It is the genetic thing.

Please don't tell me bad news.

No, no, no.

I think there's quite a lot of variation in actually how easily people laugh and how extreme that laughter can go.

We also sneeze really loudly.

Could that be connected in any way?

I mean, there's a sort of breathing aspect to it.

Yes.

Not in response to jokes, and like if we've got, you know,

like a viral infection.

Actually, that is very interesting.

That kind of genetic thing.

It would be very interesting to know more about your sneezing.

Can I scan your brain and take your genes?

This is, I think, what I'm asking.

Seriously, though.

Yeah, it actually sounds like a head of an evening.

Yeah.

I'm interested when you go weak with laughter.

Is that actually a thing, Sophie?

It actually is.

There was a really interesting study which looked at what are called postural reflexes.

And postural reflexes are the sorts of things that are going on outside of your conscious control where your spinal column is doing things to keep you stable.

So, if you're sitting in a chair and it doesn't feel like you're doing any work, but actually, your brain and your spine are doing a lot of work to keep you upright in the chair.

And as soon as you start laughing, those reflexes are suppressed.

And that means that you become, you know, you start sliding.

That can happen.

But also, if you try and do anything fiddly with your hands while you're laughing, it's impossible.

Try and do up the buttons on a shirt.

You just can't do it.

Your brain is turning off your ability to move when you are laughing.

And the more extreme the laughter, the more extreme it gets.

So it's absolutely driven by the intensity of the laughter.

That can't be good for you.

It's dangerous.

You know, there's a point when you're really lost in laughter.

Tiger strolled in at that point.

There'd be absolutely nothing you could do about it.

It's the way he wanted to go.

He wanted to be more.

Whilst in his floods of hysterics.

So we're coming to the end of our time here at Hay.

We've laughed, we've fake laughed, we've awkward laughed, we've laughed at how awkward the awkward laugh was.

We've learned we can tell the difference thanks to our age and wisdom.

Miles and Sophie, why do you think laughter is so important to us?

I think things that make us laugh are things that stick in the memory in a way.

It's easier to remember, or you're more likely to remember experiences that are particularly intense.

So I think it's that.

It's an enormously bonding thing as well.

You know, my best friends are the people that have made me laugh the most.

And they're not necessarily comics or performers or whatever.

It's the people, you know, I laugh more when I'm having dinner with my best friends than I would at like the best comedy shows.

Long before I was studying laughter, my father was desperately ill.

We were all just sitting around waiting for doctors to do something.

And we'd all been sitting around in silence.

And then he suddenly said, now, we've laughed a lot, haven't we?

And I said, yeah, we have, we have.

I thought, a bit strange.

But over the years, then I started working on laughter.

And the more I thought about what he said, the more I thought, yeah, he's absolutely right.

If you can look back on a life that's had a lot of laughter in it, it has a tremendous amount of meaning because that means you were with the people you wanted to laugh with and you had the opportunity to share that laughter with them.

And what else is there?

That's lovely.

We do have time if anyone...

If anyone has a joke that they want to share, now is your moment.

What is a vampire's favourite fruit?

I don't know.

What is a vampire's favourite fruit?

Blood orange.

Yay!

Anyone else?

I'll do another vampire joke.

Her, who's your favourite vampire?

Me, the one from Sesame Street.

Her, he doesn't count.

Me, oh, I assure you, he does.

Yay, very good.

And on that note, let's bring this show to a close.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science from Hay Festival Winter Weekend.

Thank you so much to our lovely audience and also to Miles Jupp and Sophie Scott.

Claps all round!

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

The producers were Ella Hubber and Jerry Holt.

Technical production was by Mike Cox.

The show was made at Hay Winter Weekend by BBC Wales and West.

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to the Open University.