In our primate evolution, the D smile was the first vocabulary of friendly intent and affection, in particular between near-equals. High jen ratios and the roots of human happiness are found in those moments when individuals moved toward one another toward cooperative and intimate ends. Our ultrasociality required this, as well as an all-purpose signal of cooperative intent, one that is highly visible and unambiguous, and one that could preempt conflict and spread cooperative relations potently and quickly, faster than a stranger could cock his arm and throw the first punch. Evolution’s answer to the question of how to most powerfully communicate our capacity for jen was like that of the classical Greeks: the smile.
7 Laughter
IN THE 1982 FILM Quest for Fire, three hapless Neanderthal males leave their marsh-dwelling tribe in search of fire—the source of their haphazard provision of food and the hierarchical organization of their group. During their quest the three travelers escape from saber-toothed tigers, encounter towering woolly mammoths, and scare off a potential attack from a small tribe of paunchy, red-haired Neanderthals. In this last escapade, they rescue a different kind of early human. She is a more evolved female Homo habilis, finer in bone structure and facial morphology, lacking the carpet of hair covering the body, and adorned in patterned, tribal paints.
This female leads the three males on a primordial Jules and Jim road trip to her village. In this adventure, several distinctions between the Neanderthals and the Homo habilis come into sharp focus. The Homo habilis have developed special tools: a small board with a hole in it and a rounded stick to twist to create fire whenever needed—a radical innovation appreciated even by the dim-witted Neanderthals. They have more complex vocalizations than the grunts, groans, and growls of the Neanderthals. They beautify themselves with rudimentary paints. They live in sophisticated huts, organized in patterns comparable to that of the friendliest cul-de-sacs. They cultivate plants and animals—so critical, Jared Diamond argues, to shifts in the evolution of human culture. They prefer face-to-face sex. And they laugh.
In one scene, the three Neanderthals and their new consort are reclining in the dappled light of a shady tree, grooming, scanning the environment, picking bugs out of the air to eat. Out of the blue a rock bounces off one of the male’s jutting foreheads, prompting a scratch on the head, a cursory look around, and then a return to a quiet state of mindless digestion. The Homo habilis witnesses this simplest form of humor (I spent a good part of my youth bouncing harmless objects—acorns, olives, Good & Plenties—off my brother’s head), and breaks into laughter. The three Neanderthals have no idea what to make of the weird sounds emanating from her mouth.
The thesis that laughter represents a critical evolutionary shift in hominid evolution is not as far-fetched as one might imagine. It is a point that evolutionists Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson have made. The laugh might rightfully lay claim to the status of toolmaking, agriculture, the opposable thumb, self-representation, imitation, the domestication of animals, upright gait, and symbolic language—an evolutionary signature of a great shift in our social organization, accompanied by shifts in our nervous system. What separates mammals from reptiles are the raw materials of laughter—play, and the ability to communicate with the voice (when’s the last time you heard the family gecko howl for a nibble of your salmon or purr for a scratch behind the ears?).
More striking is how human laughter differs from that of our primate relatives—gorillas, chimps, and bonobos. In the most rudimentary sense, the laughter of the great apes resembles our own. Their relaxed open-mouth displays and panting vocalizations look and sound quite familiar. They emit these displays in similar contexts as we do—when being tickled and during rough-and-tumble play. As with humans, chimps and apes are most likely to show open-mouthed play faces in developmental periods (adolescence) and times of day (leading up to feeding) where play can defuse conflict. Yet the laughter of chimps and apes is more tightly linked to inhalation and exhalation patterns than that of humans. As a result, it is emitted as short, repetitive, single-breath pants, and has little acoustic variety.
Human laughter, by contrast, is stunning in its diversity and complexity. It is a language unto its own. There are derisive laughs, flirtatious laughs, singsongy laughs, embarrassed groans, piercing laughs, laughs of tension, silent, head-lightening laughs of euphoria, barrel-chested laughs of strength, laughs that signal the absurdity of the shortness of life and the extent to which we care about our existence, contemptuous laughs that signal privilege and class, and laughs that are little more than grunts or growls. It is because of this heterogeneity that laughter has escaped simple theoretical formulation. It is the analysis of this heterogeneity that will lead to an answer about why we laugh.
LAUGHTER FACTS
In T. C. Boyle’s Drop City, a community of hippies, devoted to free love, spontaneous ritual, and immersion in nature, moves from their compound, Drop City in Sonoma County, California, to the last outpost of unspoiled nature—arctic Alaska. This journey, an expression of the American spirit, provides ample opportunity for laughter amid the inevitable conflicts of free love and broken-down cars and all too earthly negotiations of who does the dishes in a commune devoted to passion and ecstasy. Boyle’s descriptions of laughter reveal several insights about laughter:
He heard Star laugh though, a hard harsh dart of a laugh that stuck right in him as he went off into the night, looking for something else altogether.
Her first response was a laugh, musical and ringing, a laugh that made the place swell till it was like a concert hall.
And then he began to chuckle, a low soft breathless push of air that might have been the first two bars of a song.
There was a smattering of nervous laughter when he descended the steps and the laughter boiled up into a wild irrepressible storm of hoots and catcalls and whinnying shrieks as the door pulled shut and Norm put the bus in gear and headed off toward the lights of Canada.
Star let out a laugh in response to something Jimmy had said, and then they were all laughing—even him, even Marco, though he had no idea what he was laughing about or for or whether laughing was the appropriate response to the situation.
A new round of laughter. Dale Murray joined in too, whinnying along with the rest of them.
Suddenly he let out a laugh—a high sharp bark of a laugh that startled the dog out of his digestive trance—and he raised his head and gave Marco a sidelong look.
“Big spender,” she said, and her laugh trailed out over the river, hit the bank and came rebounding back again.