Why do you start laughing when you hear or see something funny?

Question

Why do you start laughing when you hear or see something funny?

In: 898

Answer 1

It’s a physical response to resolving tension in a positive way.

The setup to a joke or the normalcy of a situation is the base line. The turn in the joke or an abnormal thing happening, especially suddenly, sets up the tension. The punchline of the joke or the abnormal thing turning out not to be dangerous or having resulted in some bad outcome introduces a surprising resolution to that tension.

Then we laugh, we have a physical reaction to that tension being resolved. We show others that we are relived and relaxed and safe that they should not be tense.

That’s the baseline. Obviously there are a lot of different laughs for lots of different reasons, that’s because we are social creatures in a complex world and can be conditioned to respond to a lot of things in a lot of ways.