Why do you start laughing when you hear or see something funny?
In: 898
This is a great question! Also, everyone laughs the same no matter what country you’re from.
From what I’ve learned being an internet person, humor is a very complex social and intellectual trait that few animals have evolved the capability for. Doesn’t answer your question but I’m just guessing it’s a byproduct of the ability to be empathetic and recognize social queues and is beneficial to the group as a whole. It might be a learned behavior to give feedback. You might make up a bad joke, but you always will tell it to that friend that laughs at everything.
Didn’t Buddha say: “The source of all humour is other people’s suffering”?
i think we laugh to bond with people . prob as way to show we’re safe or on the same page as them
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.
My understanding is that the best hypothesis among neuroscientists right now is that laughter is an extension of an early primate’s “all clear” signal. The idea is that you see or hear something that seems like it might indicate danger, but then you identify the source as something that is actually silly and innocuous. You make a noise, both to release the tension of the situation and to indicate to your fellow primates that there is no actual danger here. In other words, “Ha ha! For a second I thought that vine was a snake.”
Most jokes in some way hinge upon this mechanic. The setup builds up some kind of tension, and then the punchline reveals the source of the tension to actually be something silly rather than serious.
It’s also theorized that this may have something to do with the reason why we laugh when we’re tickled. Tickling is the rough equivalent of the “play-fighting” instinct in cats and dogs–someone reaches out and grabs you in a manner that seems threatening, and weak spots (like your armpits, neck, and belly) are the ones that elicit the strongest response. The person being tickled laughs, as a way of indicating to onlookers “Don’t worry, this is not actually a threatening situation! We’re just playing!”
ELI5 why do some start laughing uncontrollably in inappropriate settings, e.g. at a funeral when there is nothing objectively funny and we’re tense but there’s nothing really to put us at ease?
According to Benign Violation theory, when you “almost” show presence of a threat which builds a sort of tension in our body, which is released when we laugh.
There’s a video of a lion at a zoo scaring some dude and then laughing about it. Also, an elephant laughing at a rhinos (pretty sure it was a rhino) small head gear. Used props and all.
Totally made up :
It is to regulate the heart beat and blood flow/oxygen of a state of mind when there was a build up or switch up
Latest Answers