The Elephant in the Brain_Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Robin Hanson

  At the time, it wasn’t clear to Bateson exactly how the monkeys were telegraphing their playful intentions to each other, just that they must have had some means of doing it. But biologists have since studied these play signals in detail, and it’s not only primates who use them. “We’re just playing” is such an important message, it turns out, that many species have developed their own vocabulary for it.25 Dogs, for example, have a “play bow”—forearms extended, head down, hindquarters in the air—which they use to initiate a bout of play.26 Chimps use an open-mouthed “play face,” similar to a human smile,27 or double over and peer between their legs at their play partners.28 And many animals, in addition to using specific gestures, will also move slowly or engage in exaggerated or unnecessary movement, as if to convey playful intent by conspicuously wasted effort that no animal would undertake if it were in serious danger. All of these signals serve to reassure playmates of one’s happy mood and friendly intentions.

  And humans, in the same vein, have laughter. But not just laughter—we also use smiling, exaggerated body movements, awkward facial expressions (like winking), and a high-pitched, giddy “play scream.” All of these signals mean roughly the same thing: “We’re just playing.” This message allows us to coordinate safe social play with other humans, especially when we’re playing in ways that hint at or border on real danger.

  We can actually distinguish two closely related meanings of laughter, depending on context. When we laugh at our own actions, it’s a signal to our playmates that our intentions are ultimately playful (although we may seem aggressive). This is the kind of laugh a young child might give after play hitting an adult or other child,29 or that adults give when they’re gently poking fun at someone. It’s the behavioral equivalent of “Just kidding!” or a winking emoji at the end of a text message . When we laugh in response to someone else’s actions, however, it’s a statement not about intentions but about perceptions. It says, “I perceive your actions as playful; I know you’re only kidding around.” This is reactive laughter, the kind elicited in response to an external stimulus. Jokes and other forms of humor are one such stimulus, but being tickled, chased, or surprised in a game of peekaboo all work the same way.30

  Both uses of laughter function as reassurances: “In spite of what might seem serious or dangerous, I’m still feeling playful.” And the “in spite of” clause is important. We don’t laugh continuously throughout a play session, only when there’s something potentially unpleasant to react to. Like all acts of communication, laughter must strive to be relevant.31 When it’s obvious that everyone is safe and happy—while quietly playing Monopoly, for example—there’s no need to belabor the obvious. We need to reinforce that “We’re just playing” only when circumstances arise which might, if not for the laughter, be mistaken for too serious or dangerous32 (see Box 11).

  This helps explain why an element of danger is so important for getting a laugh. Now, danger isn’t strictly required—we sometimes laugh at harmless wordplay, for example.33 But danger certainly helps. A pun is a lot funnier when it’s a sexual double-entendre told in the presence of children. (“How many flies does it take to screw in a light bulb? Two.”) And when there’s not enough danger, attempts at humor often fall flat. The comic strips Marmaduke and The Family Circus, for instance, are so timid and toothless (to many sensibilities) as to be considered boring.

  Box 11: Kevin Fires a Shotgun

  The first time I fired a shotgun and felt the recoil, I started laughing—somewhat hysterically, in fact. I realize that makes me sound crazy, but here’s what I think happened. A firearm is a taboo object in my culture. I was raised without any contact with guns, and so when I fired one as an adult at a shooting range, I was already perched at the psychological boundary between safety and danger. Then, given the surprise of the blast and the violent recoil, I was plunged into terror for a fraction of a second—not unlike the initial jump of a skydiver. But I quickly realized that I was perfectly safe, and my brain’s response to all this, evidently, was to laugh—to let my friends know that I felt safe and comfortable, and that I wanted to try it again.

  The play-signal theory also explains many of the instances when we don’t laugh. When a clown “trips” and falls down the stairs, you might chuckle, knowing that he’s just playing and is actually OK. But when your aging grandmother stumbles and falls, everything is decidedly not OK; her accident represents acute danger. It’s only after you’ve rushed to her side and discovered that she’s perfectly safe that maybe it becomes reasonable to laugh about the situation—especially if she starts laughing first. In fact, the logic of laughter explains why her laughter is likely to trigger yours, rather than the other way around. If she laughs first, it means she feels safe, so you can feel safe too. But if you laugh first, she’s liable to take offense. How could you feel safe when she hasn’t given the “all clear” (you insensitive clod)? It must mean you don’t really care what happens to her.

  In light of all this, we’re now equipped to think about the relationship between laughter and humor. In any given comedic situation, humor precedes and causes laughter, but when we step back and take a broader perspective, the order is reversed. Our propensity to laugh comes first and provides the necessary goal for humor to achieve.34 Humor can thus be seen as an art form, a means of provoking laughter subject to certain stylistic constraints. Humorists, in general, work in the abstract media of words and images. They don’t get credit, as humorists, for provoking laughter by physical means—by tickling their audiences, for example. They’re also generally discouraged from eliciting contagious laughter, that is, by laughing themselves.

  In this way, humor is like opening a safe. There’s a sequence of steps that have to be performed in the right order and with a good deal of precision. First you need to get two or more people together.35 Then you must set the mood dial to “play.” Then you need to jostle things, carefully, so that the dial feints in the direction of “serious,” but quickly falls back to “play.” And only then will the safe come open, releasing the precious laugher locked inside.36

  Different cultures may put different constraints on how a humorist is allowed to interact with the safe, or they may set a different “combination,” that is, by defining “playful” and “serious” in their own idiosyncratic ways such that one culture’s humor might not unlock a foreigner’s safe. But the core locking mechanism is the same in every human brain, and we come straight out of the factory ready to be tickled open, literally and metaphorically.

  THE DARK SIDE OF LAUGHTER

  “In everything that we perceive as funny there is an element which, if we were serious and sufficiently sensitive, and sufficiently concerned, would be unpleasant.”—Max Eastman37

  As we mentioned earlier, people are profoundly ignorant about laughter’s meaning and purpose (at least in our default state, before learning the science). But where does this ignorance come from? Why does introspection fail us so spectacularly here?

  It’s not simply because laughter is involuntary, outside our conscious control. Flinching, for example, is also involuntary, and yet we understand perfectly well why we do it: to protect ourselves from getting hit. Thus our ignorance about laughter needs further explanation.

  As we’ve hinted, such ignorance may be strategic; our brains may be trying to hide something. And yet the meaning of laughter—“We’re playing!”—seems entirely innocent and aboveboard.

  Perhaps it’s not what laughter is that makes us uncomfortable, but rather how we use it. In this regard, laughter is like money. It doesn’t bother us to “admit” that money is a medium of exchange,38 but we might well be embarrassed to reveal our credit card statements to the entire world. When the New York Times reported that Target can predict whether a woman is pregnant simply by analyzing her recent purchases, it caused quite a stir among privacy advocates, for obvious reasons.39 Similarly, if our brains kept a log of all the specific situations that ever jiggled a laugh out of us, we might be
just as nervous about opening those records up for the world to inspect. As Provine points out, “Laughter . . . is a powerful probe into social relationships.”40 But often we don’t want to be probed. We crave privacy and plausible deniability, and our natural ignorance about laughter may provide just the cover we need.

  To understand what laughter reveals (that we might prefer to keep hidden), we need to consider two important factors: norms and psychological distance.

  NORMS

  As young children, most of our play concerns the physical world. And what we laugh at is similarly physical or physiological. Common triggers for laughter among infants and toddlers include mock aggression (tickling, chasing), mock danger (being thrown in the air by a caretaker), and carefully crafted surprises (peekaboo).

  As we age, however, we start paying more attention to the social world and its attendant dangers, many of which revolve around norms. In Chapter 3, we saw how norm violations can be serious business. When we violate a norm, we have to worry about getting caught and punished. And when someone else seems to violate a norm, we have to ask ourselves, “Is this a threat? Do I need to step in and regulate?” Our actions in these situations carry real risks. If we misstep, we might face disapproval from our peers or censure from authority figures—or worse. Remember the Maori villager who was killed for too much freeloading?

  But where there’s danger, there’s also an opportunity for exploratory play. And just as the physical danger of a roller coaster tickles our physiological funny bone, flirting with norm-related danger tickles our social funny bone.41

  Consider a five-year-old girl who finds potty humor hilarious. She knows it’s rude to perform (or talk about) certain bodily functions in front of others, and that she risks being punished if she does. But at the same time, she can’t take every rule at face value; she needs to probe her boundaries. Just how serious are these norms, really? If she soils her pants, of course, she may feel legitimately ashamed—and thus, no laughter. But if she merely farts, she’ll quickly learn that the danger is quite small; her parents may scowl, but they’re not going to send her to her room. And this realization—that farting can be safe, even though it’s officially discouraged—is liable to provoke some laughter. And a whoopie cushion may be even funnier to the young girl, since it produces only fake fart noises, and is entirely benign.

  At some point during her development, however, she’ll exhaust the learning opportunities around bodily norms, and they’ll cease to be a fertile source of play. And soon she’ll graduate to the grown-up world, where we’re concerned mostly with social, sexual, and moral norms. These are an endless source of fascination, in part because there are so many of them, with so many nuances, that we can never hope to learn all of their boundaries and edge cases. But they’re also fascinating because they’re always shifting around as circumstances and attitudes change. Just as guides to etiquette need to be refreshed every few years, so too must our humor evolve to keep up with changing norms. What was once a sweet spot for comedy can evolve into a genuine sore spot, a cultural bruise—or vice versa. The shifting political landscape can neuter what was once a deadly serious accusation (“Commie!”), turning it into a playful insult. Tech innovations, such as the cell phone, turn old norms upside down and force new ones to come into being. Only some of these norms are ever written down—and when they are, they’re often obsolete as soon as the ink is dry. They vary widely across different communities and contexts. And sometimes, as with sexual norms, they’re uncomfortable to discuss in precise terms or in serious settings. All of these factors make them ripe for play, and therefore laughter.

  In the broadest sense, there are at least two ways to use the danger of norms for comedic effect. The first is to feint across the norm boundary, but then retreat back to safety without actually violating it. The second way is to step across the boundary, violating the norm, and then to realize, like a child jumping into snow for the first time, “It’s safe over here! Wheee!”

  Here, for example, is a joke that flirts with, but doesn’t actually consummate, a norm violation:

  MARY: What do you call a black man flying a plane?

  JOHN: Uh . . . I don’t know… .

  MARY: A pilot. What did you think, you racist?!

  The humor here plays off the norm against racism. After Mary’s setup, John starts to squirm uncomfortably, afraid his friend is about to tell an offensive joke. But when Mary delivers the punchline, it’s sweet, safe relief. She wasn’t telling a racist joke after all. She was just playing! And a hearty chuckle ensues.42

  This joke uses the norm against racism only to provide the sense of danger, and achieves safety (and laughter) by not violating it. In this way, the joke ultimately reinforces the norm. But other jokes don’t pull back from the norm violation, and must achieve safety by other means, which often subverts the norms that they’re playing with.

  In September 2012, for example, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published irreverent cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, including a few nude caricatures. While many secular liberals found the cartoons humorous, some fundamentalist Muslims most definitely did not. These divergent attitudes are a reflection of how seriously each group treats the norms against mocking religion (in general) or depicting Muhammad (in particular). Secularists feel that such “norms” shouldn’t have much sway in public life, while fundamentalists would like them to be enshrined as law.

  What our brains choose to laugh at, then, reveals a lot about our true feelings in morally charged situations. It says, “I realize something is supposedly considered ‘wrong’ here, but I’m not taking it seriously.” If we laugh at cartoon drawings of Muhammad, our brains reveal that we’re only weakly committed to the norm in question. What seems like a mere cartoon is actually a proxy for much deeper issues.

  A real danger of laughter, then, is the fact that we don’t all share the same norms to the same degree. What’s sacred to one person can be an object of mere play to another. And so when we laugh at norm violations, it often serves to weaken the norms that others may wish to uphold. This helps explain why people charged with maintaining the highest standards of propriety—schoolmarms, religious leaders, the guardians in Plato’s Republic, the Chinese officials who banned puns in 201443—have an interest in tamping down on laughter and humor.

  When two people laugh at the same joke for the same reasons, it brings them closer together. But when we laugh at another person’s sacred cow, it ceases to be all fun and games.

  PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTANCE

  The other kind of sensitive information our brains “leak” through laughter is how we feel toward those who become the objects of our comedy, the butts of our jokes. The less we care about people, the easier is it to laugh when bad things happen to them.

  Actually two variables are important here. The first is, simply, how much pain is involved. We’re more likely to laugh at a pinprick than at a broken bone, and more likely to laugh at a broken bone than a violent death.

  The second variable is psychological distance.44 When people are “farther” from us, psychologically, we’re slower to empathize with them, and more likely to laugh at their pain. “Tragedy,” said Mel Brooks, “is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.”45According to this measure, friends are closer than acquaintances, who in turn are closer than enemies. But our perception of psychological distance depends on many other factors. For example, events that take place in the make-believe space of fiction are more psychologically distant than events that happen in real life, and cartoon comedies are more remote than live-action dramas. Similarly, ancient history is more psychologically remote than recent history. In an episode of South Park, the characters joke about whether enough time has passed for AIDS to be considered funny.46 Or as Carol Burnett said, “Comedy is tragedy plus time.”47

  Together these two variables determine how much pain we feel, sympathetically, upon learning about someone else’s misfortune. When someon
e close to us suffers terribly, we feel it in our marrow; it hurts. But when a distant stranger suffers only a scratch, it hardly registers for us. In between, of course, are all the interesting edge cases: a close friend who spills wine on her lap, or a second-cousin who breaks his arm doing something stupid. Whether or how hard we laugh at such edge cases says a lot about our relationship to the person experiencing pain.

  Imagine a group of three popular middle-school girls standing by their lockers in the hallway. One of their unpopular classmates, Maggie, walks by and trips, spilling her books and papers everywhere—and the popular girls start pointing and laughing.

  Clearly this laughter is rude, perhaps even aggressive. When someone gets hurt, the humane response is to break from a playful mood into a serious mood, to make sure they’re OK. The popular girls’ laughter, then, reveals that they don’t take Maggie’s suffering seriously. They’re treating her pain as an object of play—a mere plaything.

  Note that this isn’t a different type of laughter than the kind we saw earlier. It means the same thing: “In spite of what just happened, I’m feeling safe.” Or “I realize something is supposedly ‘wrong’ here, but it doesn’t bother me.” It’s the context that makes this laughter rude and mean-spirited.

  Now, we need to be careful how we moralize about what these popular girls are doing. It would be easy to condemn them for laughing at the misfortune of another human being. But that’s not the real problem; we all laugh at other people in this way. Consider the Darwin Awards, a website that “commemorates those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.” It’s a catalog of gruesome deaths (usually involving irony, stupidity, or both), played entirely for laughs. But although the accidents described in the Darwin Awards are vastly more serious than Maggie’s stumble, we find it funny because the victims are strangers, and thus their pain doesn’t register as serious for us. For better or worse, this is how we’re wired.