Trial By Jury

Would you bother to tickle a rat if you couldn’t hear it laugh? Probably not---but take a look here. It’s quite possible that the physiological response of laughter (including its pleasures) is something we share with at least some of our fellow mammals. And don’t be mislead by the casualness of this YouTube presentation. If you want to see how rigorous the science is in this rat-tickling research, see the article by Jaak Panksepp (the tickler in the video) and Jeff Burgdorf in Physiology and Behavior.

Here’s what got me going on all this. A few nights ago I came across something in a book I was reading that was so unexpected and hilarious that I laughed out loud, spontaneously, automatically. Then it occurred to me how strange to my ears that sounded---raucous laughing when no one else was present, my own laughter in an otherwise empty room. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that laughter was essentially a form of social communication whose primary function was to foster social cohesion (the cruelty of some laughter being the exception to the rule).

Then I remembered how much fun it was as a child to laugh and keep on laughing and howling (ecstasy!) when an adult would absolutely take over and tickle me relentlessly. That experience seemed to me like a sort of ultimate funny---a conclusion that made a kind of child-logic sense: Everybody laughed when there was something funny, and being tickled was when I laughed the most and the loudest, so being tickled was the funniest thing that could happen.

Groucho Marx said, “I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.” Everything about that quip is abstract, conceptual, mental. It’s as abstract and conceptual as tickling and laughter are physical, but when a joke works it can give us a tiny hit of delight, a split second of joy. Why should our brain’s pleasure centers be turned on by thoughts and ideas, why should the endorphins flow? Why do we like funny things so much, even if we don’t laugh out loud? The experts used to say, “It’s the incongruity, stupid!” But maybe that just pushes it back a notch. How is it that the abstract relationship of incongruity can give us so much pleasure?

In the brief paragraph at the beginning of the article in Physiology and Behavior mentioned above, the authors speak of the “joyfulness of human childhood laughter.” Even better, you’ll find “Joy” in the title of the paper. These are hard-core scientists. Something must be going on.