Psychology professor Robert Provine spent decades studying laughter. He approached it as if he were an alien who had just arrived on Earth: Where did these strange sounds come from, and what did they mean?
To investigate, Provine recorded people laughing and took the recordings to a sound laboratory at a national zoo, where researchers usually studied birdsong. He also built his own laboratory to examine the pitch and frequency of laughter.
Provine then collected thousands of examples of people laughing in public, along with the remarks that came immediately before each laugh. His observations revealed that most laughter was not caused by anything particularly amusing.
"Laughter and humor are related but different things," Provine once explained. "Laughter is very old. It is a sound primates make while playing. Humor is a more recent thinking and language skill. People were laughing long before humor existed."
When Provine began his research in the 1980s, almost no one was studying laughter itself. He later published some of his findings in a 2004 article in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
One of his clearest findings was that laughter is deeply social. It was 30 times more frequent when people were with others than when they were alone. On their own, people were more likely to talk to themselves or simply smile.
Provine also found that speakers laughed 46 percent more often than their listeners. They seemed to use laughter like punctuation, placing it at natural breaks in their speech. A similar pattern appeared among people communicating through sign language, who laughed at comparable points in their conversations.
Most surprisingly, only 10 to 15 percent of the remarks made immediately before a laugh were even remotely funny. People often laughed after ordinary comments such as, "I have to go now."
So, with that in mind, feel free to laugh right about here.