- The speaker recalls a childhood memory of her parents laughing and wanting to join in.
- Laughter is a strange and primitive sound, more like an animal call than speech.
- Laughter involves the contraction of muscles in the ribcage, similar to breathing and talking.
- Laughter is found in mammals and is associated with play and social interactions.
- Laughter is behaviorally contagious and can be caught from others.
- There may be two types of laughter: involuntary laughter and posed social laughter.
- The brain responds differently to real and posed laughter, with auditory processing for real laughter and mentalizing for posed laughter.

- A study found that people get better at recognizing real laughter as they get older, with peak performance in their late 30s and early 40s.
- Younger people are more likely to be influenced by laughter and want to join in, but as people age, laughter becomes less contagious.
- Laughter is an important social emotion and can be used to regulate emotions in close relationships, leading to higher relationship satisfaction.
- Laughter is a way to transition from difficult or stressful situations to more enjoyable ones.
- Laughter is a universal behavior among mammals and helps regulate emotions and maintain social bonds.

Did you know that you're 30 times more likely to laugh if you're with somebody else than if you're alone? Cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott shares this and other surprising facts about laughter in this fast-paced, action-packed and, yes, hilarious dash through the science of the topic.

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Hi, I'm going to talk to you today about laughter.

And I just want to start by thinking about the first time I can ever remember noticing laughter.

This is when I was a little girl, I would have been about 6, and I came across my parents doing something unusual, but they were laughing.

I did not know what they were laughing at, but I wanted in.

I wanted to be part of that, and I kind of sat around at the edge going, hoo-hoo!

Now, incidentally, What they were laughing at was a song which people used to sing, which was based around signs in toilets on trains telling you what you could and could not do in toilets on trains.

And the thing you have to remember about the English is, of course, we do have an immensely sophisticated sense of humor.

But At the time, I didn't understand anything of that.

And actually, as a neuroscientist, I've come to care about it again.

What I'm going to do now is just play some examples of real human beings laughing, and I want you just to think about the sound people make and how odd that can be, and in fact, how primitive laughter is as a sound.

It's much more like an animal call than it is like speech.

Now this next guy, I need him to breathe.

There's a point when I'm just like, you've got

And finally we have this is a human female laughing and laughter can take us to some pretty odd places in terms of making noises

She actually says, oh my God, what is that in French?

And I think, you know, people kind of wither.

Now to understand laughter, you have to look at a part of the body that psychologists and neuroscientists don't normally spend very much time looking at, which is the ribcage.

And it doesn't seem terribly exciting, but actually, you're all using your ribcage all the time.

What you're all doing at the moment with your ribcage, and don't stop doing it, is breathing.

So you use the intercostal muscles, the muscles between your ribs, to bring air in and out of your lungs, just by expanding and contracting your ribcage.

You can always put a strap around the outside of your chest, or a breath belt, and just look at that movement.

You see a sort of rather gentle sinusoidal movement.

As soon as you start talking, you start using your breathing completely differently.

So what I'm doing now is you see something much more like this.

In talking, you use a very fine movement of the ribcage to squeeze the air out.

And in fact, we're the only animals that can do this.

Now, both talking and breathing has a mortal enemy, and that enemy is laughter.

Because what happens when you laugh is those same muscles start to contract very regularly, and you get this very marked sort of zigzagging, and that's just squeezing the air out of you.

It literally is that basic a way of making a sound.

You could be stamping on somebody, it's having the same effect, you're just squeezing air out, and each of those contractions gives you a sound.

And now the contractions run together, you can get these spasms, and that's when you start getting these kind of, aaaah, things happening.

In terms of the science of laughter, there isn't very much, but it does turn out that pretty much everything we think we know about laughter is wrong.

So it's not at all unusual, for example, to hear people say, humans are the only animals that laugh.

Nietzsche thought humans are the only animals that laugh.

In fact, you find laughter throughout mammals.

It's been well described and well observed in primates, but you also see it in rats.

And wherever you find it, humans, primates, rats, you find it associated with things like tickling.

You find it associated with play, and all mammals play.

And wherever you find it, it's associated with interactions.

So Robert Provine, who's done a lot of work on this, has pointed out that you are 30 times more likely to laugh if you are with somebody else than if you're on your own.

And where you find most laughter is in social interactions like conversation.

So if you ask human beings, when do you laugh, they'll talk about comedy and humor and jokes.

If you look at when they laugh, they're laughing with their friends.

And when we laugh with people, we're hardly ever actually laughing at jokes.

You are laughing to show people that you understand them, that you agree with them, that you're part of the same group as them.

You're laughing to show that you like them, You might even love them.

You're doing all that at the same time as talking to them.

And in fact, the laughter is doing a lot of that emotional work for you.

Something that Robert Provine has pointed out, as you can see here, and in fact, the reason why we were laughing when we heard those funny laughs at the start and why I was laughing when I found my parents laughing, is that it's an enormously behaviorally contagious effect.

You can catch laughter from somebody else, and you are more likely to catch laughter off somebody else if you know them.

So it's still modulated by this social context.

You have to put humor to 1 side and think about the social meaning of laughter, because that's where its origins lie.

Now, something I've got very interested in is different kinds of laughter.

And we have some neurobiological evidence about how human beings vocalize that suggests there might be 2 kinds of laughs that we have.

So it seems possible that the neurobiology for helpless, involuntary laughter, like my parents lying on the floor screaming about a silly song, might have a different basis to it than some of that more polite, social laughter that you encounter, which isn't horrible laughter, but it's behavior somebody is doing as part of their communicative act to you, part of their interaction with you.

Now, in our evolution, we've developed 2 different ways of vocalizing.

Involuntary vocalizations are part of an older system.

The more voluntary vocalizations, like the speech I'm doing now.

So we might imagine that laughter might actually have 2 different routes.

So I've been looking at this in more detail.

And to do this, we've had to make recordings of people laughing, and we've just had to do whatever it takes to make people laugh.

And we've got those same people to produce more posed social laughter.

So you said, imagine your friend told a joke and you're laughing because you like your friend, but not really, because the joke's all that.

So I'm going to play you a couple of those.

I want you to tell me if you think this laughter is real laughter or if you think it's posed.

So is this involuntary laughter or more voluntary laughter?

And in fact, To record that, all I had to do was record me watching 1 of my friends listening to something I knew she wanted to laugh at, and I just started doing this.

Now, what you find is that people are good at telling the difference between real and posed laughter.

Interestingly, you see something quite similar with chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees laugh differently if they're being tickled than if they're playing with each other.

We might be seeing something like that here, these involuntary laughter, tickling laughter, being different from social laughter.

The real laughs are longer, they're higher in pitch.

When you start laughing hard, you start squeezing air out from your lungs under much higher pressures than you could ever produce voluntarily.

So, for example, I could never pitch my voice that high to sing.

And also, as I say, you start to get these sort of contractions and these weird whistling sounds, all of which mean that real laughter is extremely easy or feels extremely easy to spot.

In contrast, posed laughter, which we sort of think might sound a bit fake, actually, it's not.

It's such an important social cue, we use it a lot, we're choosing to laugh in a lot of situations, and it seems to be its own thing.

So, for example, you find nasality in posed laughter, that kind of ha-ha-ha-ha-ha sound that you never get, you could not do if you were laughing involuntarily.

So there do seem to be genuinely these 2 different sorts of things.

We took it into the scanner to see how brains respond when you hear laughter.

And when you do this, this is a really boring experiment.

We just played people, real and posed laughs.

We didn't tell them it was a study on laughter, and we put other sounds in there to distract them.

And all they're doing is listening to sounds.

Nonetheless, when you hear real laughter and when you hear posed laughter, the brains are responding completely differently, significantly differently.

What you see in the regions in blue, which lies in auditory cortex, are the brain areas that respond more to the real laughs.

And what it seems to be the case, When you hear somebody laughing involuntarily, you hear sounds you would never hear in any other context.

It's very unambiguous, and it seems to be associated with greater auditory processing of these novel sounds.

In contrast, when you hear somebody laughing in a posed way, what you see are these regions in pink, which are occupying brain areas associated with mentalizing, thinking about what somebody else is thinking.

And I think what that means is, even if you're having your brain scanned, which is completely boring and not very interesting, when you hear somebody going, ah, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, you're trying to work out why they're laughing.

You are always trying to understand it in context, even if, as far as you're concerned, at that point in time, it's not necessarily anything to do with you.

You still want to know why those people are laughing.

Now, we've had the opportunity to look at how people hear real and posed laughter across the age range.

So this was an online experiment we ran with the Royal Society, and here we just asked people 2 questions.

First of all, they heard some laughs, and they had to say, how real or posed do these laughs sound?

The real laughs are shown in red, and the posed laughs are shown in blue.

As you get older, you get better and better and better at spotting real laughter.

By the time you are older, you get better.

But interestingly, you do not hit peak performance in this data set until you're in your late 30s and early 40s.

You don't understand laughter fully by the time you hit puberty.

You don't understand laughter fully by the time your brain has matured at the end of your teens.

You're learning about laughter throughout your entire early adult life.

If we turn the question around and now say, not what does the laughter sound like in terms of being real or posed, but how much does this laughter make you want to laugh, how contagious is this laughter to you, we see a different profile.

And here, the younger you are, the more you want to join in when you hear laughter.

Remember me laughing with my parents, I've got no idea what was going on.

Now, everybody, young and old, finds the real laughs more contagious than the posed laughs, but as you get older, it all becomes less contagious to you.

Now, either we're all just becoming really grumpy as we get older.

Or it may mean that as you understand laughter better, and you are getting better at doing that, you need more than just hearing people laugh to want to laugh.

So we've got a very interesting behavior about which a lot of our lay assumptions are incorrect.

But I'm coming to see that actually, there's even more to laughter than it's an important social emotion we should look at, because it turns out people are phenomenally nuanced in terms of how we use laughter.

There's a really lovely set of studies coming out from Robert Levenson's lab in California, where he's doing a longitudinal study with couples.

He gets married couples, men and women, into the lab, and he gives them stressful conversations to have while he wires them up to a polygraph so he can see them becoming stressed.

So you've got the 2 of them in there, and he'll say to the husband, tell me something that your wife does that irritates you.

And what you see is immediately, just run 1 through your head briefly, you and your partner, you can imagine everybody gets a bit more stressed as soon as that starts.

You can see physically people become more stressed.

What he finds is that the couples who manage that feeling of stress with laughter, positive emotions like laughter, not only immediately become less stressed, they can see them physically feeling better, they're dealing with this unpleasant situation better together, they are also the couples that report higher levels of satisfaction in their relationship and they stay together for longer.

So in fact, when you look at close relationships, Laughter is a phenomenally useful index of how people are regulating their emotions together.

We're not just admitting it to each other to show that we like each other.

We're making ourselves feel better together.

Now, I don't think this is going to be limited to romantic relationships.

I think this is probably going to be a characteristic of close emotional relationships, such as you might have with friends, which explains my next clip, which is of a YouTube video of some young men in the former East Germany on making a video to promote their heavy metal band, and it's extremely macho and the mood is very serious, and I want you to notice what happens in terms of laughter when things go wrong and how quickly that happens and how that changes the mood.

He's cold, he's about to get wet, he's got swimming trunks on, he's got a towel.

What might possibly happen Video starts Serious mood

yeah, And my new band is called Seaskill.

The thing I really like about that is it's all very kind of serious until he jumps onto the ice and as soon as he doesn't go through the ice, but also there isn't blood and bone everywhere, his friends start laughing.

And imagine if I'm played out with him, standing there going, no, seriously, Henrik, I think this is broken.

And we wouldn't enjoy watching that, that would be stressful.

Or if he was running around with a visibly broken leg laughing and his friends all going, Henrik, I think we need to go to the hospital now, that also wouldn't be funny.

The fact that the laughter works, it gets him from a painful, embarrassing, difficult situation into a funny situation, is what we're actually enjoying there.

And I think that's a really interesting use, and it's actually happening all the time.

So, for example, I can remember now something very much like this happening at my father's funeral.

We weren't jumping around on the ice in our underpants.

But, But But But But But These events are always difficult.

I had a relative who was being a bit difficult, my mum was not in a good place.

And I can remember finding myself, just before the whole thing started, telling this story about something that happened in a 1970s sitcom.

And even at the time, I thought, I don't know why I'm doing this.

And all I realized I was doing was I was coming up with something from somewhere I could use to make her laugh, together with me.

It was a very basic reaction to show, on some reason, we can do this, we can laugh together, we're going to get through this, We're going to be OK.

And in fact, all of us are doing this all the time.

You do it so often, you don't even notice it.

Everybody underestimates how often they laugh.

And you're doing something when you laugh with people that's actually letting you access a really ancient, evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds and clearly to regulate emotions, to make ourselves feel better.

It's not something specific to humans, it's a really ancient behavior which really helps us regulate how we feel and makes us feel better.

In other words, when it comes to laughter, you and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals.


Speaker 0: Hi, I'm going to talk to you today about laughter. And I just want to start by thinking about the first time I can ever remember noticing laughter. This is when I was a little girl, I would have been about 6, and I came across my parents doing something unusual, but they were laughing. They were laughing very, very hard. They were lying on the floor laughing.

They were screaming with laughter. I did not know what they were laughing at, but I wanted in. I wanted to be part of that, and I kind of sat around at the edge going, hoo-hoo! Now, incidentally, What they were laughing at was a song which people used to sing, which was based around signs in toilets on trains telling you what you could and could not do in toilets on trains. And the thing you have to remember about the English is, of course, we do have an immensely sophisticated sense of humor.

But At the time, I didn't understand anything of that. I just cared about the laughter. And actually, as a neuroscientist, I've come to care about it again. And it is a really weird thing to do. What I'm going to do now is just play some examples of real human beings laughing, and I want you just to think about the sound people make and how odd that can be, and in fact, how primitive laughter is as a sound.

It's much more like an animal call than it is like speech. So here we've got some laughter for you. The first 1 is pretty joyful. I'm not joyful.

Speaker 1: He he he he he. He he he he he he. He he he he he he. He ho he ho he ho he ho he ho. We're off.

He he he he he. He ho he ho he ho he ho he ho. He ho he ho he ho he ho he ho. He ha ha.

Speaker 0: Now this next guy, I need him to breathe. There's a point when I'm just like, you've got

Speaker 1: to get some air

Speaker 0: in there, mate, because he just

Speaker 1: sounds like he's breathing out. Ah! Ahahahahaha! Ahahahahaha! Ahahahahaha!

Speaker 0: This hasn't been edited, this is him. And finally we have this is a human female laughing and laughter can take us to some pretty odd places in terms of making noises

Speaker 1: Oh

Speaker 0: my God, what is that? She actually says, oh my God, what is that in French? And I think, you know, people kind of wither. I have no idea. Now to understand laughter, you have to look at a part of the body that psychologists and neuroscientists don't normally spend very much time looking at, which is the ribcage.

And it doesn't seem terribly exciting, but actually, you're all using your ribcage all the time. What you're all doing at the moment with your ribcage, and don't stop doing it, is breathing. So you use the intercostal muscles, the muscles between your ribs, to bring air in and out of your lungs, just by expanding and contracting your ribcage. You can always put a strap around the outside of your chest, or a breath belt, and just look at that movement. You see a sort of rather gentle sinusoidal movement.

So that's breathing. You're all doing it. Don't stop. As soon as you start talking, you start using your breathing completely differently. So what I'm doing now is you see something much more like this.

In talking, you use a very fine movement of the ribcage to squeeze the air out. And in fact, we're the only animals that can do this. It's why we can talk at all. Now, both talking and breathing has a mortal enemy, and that enemy is laughter. Because what happens when you laugh is those same muscles start to contract very regularly, and you get this very marked sort of zigzagging, and that's just squeezing the air out of you.

It literally is that basic a way of making a sound. You could be stamping on somebody, it's having the same effect, you're just squeezing air out, and each of those contractions gives you a sound. And now the contractions run together, you can get these spasms, and that's when you start getting these kind of, aaaah, things happening. I'm brilliant at this. I'm brilliant at this.

I'm brilliant at this. I'm brilliant at this.

Speaker 1: I'm brilliant at this.

Speaker 0: In terms of the science of laughter, there isn't very much, but it does turn out that pretty much everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. So it's not at all unusual, for example, to hear people say, humans are the only animals that laugh. Nietzsche thought humans are the only animals that laugh. In fact, you find laughter throughout mammals. It's been well described and well observed in primates, but you also see it in rats.

And wherever you find it, humans, primates, rats, you find it associated with things like tickling. And that's the same for humans. You find it associated with play, and all mammals play. And wherever you find it, it's associated with interactions. So Robert Provine, who's done a lot of work on this, has pointed out that you are 30 times more likely to laugh if you are with somebody else than if you're on your own.

And where you find most laughter is in social interactions like conversation. So if you ask human beings, when do you laugh, they'll talk about comedy and humor and jokes. If you look at when they laugh, they're laughing with their friends. And when we laugh with people, we're hardly ever actually laughing at jokes. You are laughing to show people that you understand them, that you agree with them, that you're part of the same group as them.

You're laughing to show that you like them, You might even love them. You're doing all that at the same time as talking to them. And in fact, the laughter is doing a lot of that emotional work for you. Something that Robert Provine has pointed out, as you can see here, and in fact, the reason why we were laughing when we heard those funny laughs at the start and why I was laughing when I found my parents laughing, is that it's an enormously behaviorally contagious effect. You can catch laughter from somebody else, and you are more likely to catch laughter off somebody else if you know them.

So it's still modulated by this social context. You have to put humor to 1 side and think about the social meaning of laughter, because that's where its origins lie. Now, something I've got very interested in is different kinds of laughter. And we have some neurobiological evidence about how human beings vocalize that suggests there might be 2 kinds of laughs that we have. So it seems possible that the neurobiology for helpless, involuntary laughter, like my parents lying on the floor screaming about a silly song, might have a different basis to it than some of that more polite, social laughter that you encounter, which isn't horrible laughter, but it's behavior somebody is doing as part of their communicative act to you, part of their interaction with you.

They are choosing to do this. Now, in our evolution, we've developed 2 different ways of vocalizing. Involuntary vocalizations are part of an older system. The more voluntary vocalizations, like the speech I'm doing now. So we might imagine that laughter might actually have 2 different routes.

So I've been looking at this in more detail. And to do this, we've had to make recordings of people laughing, and we've just had to do whatever it takes to make people laugh. And we've got those same people to produce more posed social laughter. So you said, imagine your friend told a joke and you're laughing because you like your friend, but not really, because the joke's all that. So I'm going to play you a couple of those.

I want you to tell me if you think this laughter is real laughter or if you think it's posed. So is this involuntary laughter or more voluntary laughter?

Speaker 1: Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Speaker 0: What does that sound like to you? Posed? Posed. How about this 1? Ha ha ha ha ha!

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Speaker 1: Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Speaker 0: I'm the best. Ha ha ha ha ha! Not really. Really. Now, that was helpless laughter.

And in fact, To record that, all I had to do was record me watching 1 of my friends listening to something I knew she wanted to laugh at, and I just started doing this. Now, what you find is that people are good at telling the difference between real and posed laughter. They seem to be different things to us. Interestingly, you see something quite similar with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees laugh differently if they're being tickled than if they're playing with each other.

We might be seeing something like that here, these involuntary laughter, tickling laughter, being different from social laughter. They're acoustically very different. The real laughs are longer, they're higher in pitch. When you start laughing hard, you start squeezing air out from your lungs under much higher pressures than you could ever produce voluntarily. So, for example, I could never pitch my voice that high to sing.

And also, as I say, you start to get these sort of contractions and these weird whistling sounds, all of which mean that real laughter is extremely easy or feels extremely easy to spot. In contrast, posed laughter, which we sort of think might sound a bit fake, actually, it's not. It's such an important social cue, we use it a lot, we're choosing to laugh in a lot of situations, and it seems to be its own thing. So, for example, you find nasality in posed laughter, that kind of ha-ha-ha-ha-ha sound that you never get, you could not do if you were laughing involuntarily. So there do seem to be genuinely these 2 different sorts of things.

We took it into the scanner to see how brains respond when you hear laughter. And when you do this, this is a really boring experiment. We just played people, real and posed laughs. We didn't tell them it was a study on laughter, and we put other sounds in there to distract them. And all they're doing is listening to sounds.

We don't tell them to do anything. Nonetheless, when you hear real laughter and when you hear posed laughter, the brains are responding completely differently, significantly differently. What you see in the regions in blue, which lies in auditory cortex, are the brain areas that respond more to the real laughs. And what it seems to be the case, When you hear somebody laughing involuntarily, you hear sounds you would never hear in any other context. It's very unambiguous, and it seems to be associated with greater auditory processing of these novel sounds.

In contrast, when you hear somebody laughing in a posed way, what you see are these regions in pink, which are occupying brain areas associated with mentalizing, thinking about what somebody else is thinking. And I think what that means is, even if you're having your brain scanned, which is completely boring and not very interesting, when you hear somebody going, ah, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, you're trying to work out why they're laughing. Laughter is always meaningful. You are always trying to understand it in context, even if, as far as you're concerned, at that point in time, it's not necessarily anything to do with you. You still want to know why those people are laughing.

Now, we've had the opportunity to look at how people hear real and posed laughter across the age range. So this was an online experiment we ran with the Royal Society, and here we just asked people 2 questions. First of all, they heard some laughs, and they had to say, how real or posed do these laughs sound? The real laughs are shown in red, and the posed laughs are shown in blue. What you see is there is a rapid onset.

As you get older, you get better and better and better at spotting real laughter. Such as six-year-olds are at chance. They can't really hear the difference. By the time you are older, you get better. But interestingly, you do not hit peak performance in this data set until you're in your late 30s and early 40s.

You don't understand laughter fully by the time you hit puberty. You don't understand laughter fully by the time your brain has matured at the end of your teens. You're learning about laughter throughout your entire early adult life. If we turn the question around and now say, not what does the laughter sound like in terms of being real or posed, but how much does this laughter make you want to laugh, how contagious is this laughter to you, we see a different profile. And here, the younger you are, the more you want to join in when you hear laughter.

Remember me laughing with my parents, I've got no idea what was going on. You really can see this. Now, everybody, young and old, finds the real laughs more contagious than the posed laughs, but as you get older, it all becomes less contagious to you. Now, either we're all just becoming really grumpy as we get older. Or it may mean that as you understand laughter better, and you are getting better at doing that, you need more than just hearing people laugh to want to laugh.

You need the social stuff there. So we've got a very interesting behavior about which a lot of our lay assumptions are incorrect. But I'm coming to see that actually, there's even more to laughter than it's an important social emotion we should look at, because it turns out people are phenomenally nuanced in terms of how we use laughter. There's a really lovely set of studies coming out from Robert Levenson's lab in California, where he's doing a longitudinal study with couples. He gets married couples, men and women, into the lab, and he gives them stressful conversations to have while he wires them up to a polygraph so he can see them becoming stressed.

So you've got the 2 of them in there, and he'll say to the husband, tell me something that your wife does that irritates you. And what you see is immediately, just run 1 through your head briefly, you and your partner, you can imagine everybody gets a bit more stressed as soon as that starts. You can see physically people become more stressed. What he finds is that the couples who manage that feeling of stress with laughter, positive emotions like laughter, not only immediately become less stressed, they can see them physically feeling better, they're dealing with this unpleasant situation better together, they are also the couples that report higher levels of satisfaction in their relationship and they stay together for longer. So in fact, when you look at close relationships, Laughter is a phenomenally useful index of how people are regulating their emotions together.

We're not just admitting it to each other to show that we like each other. We're making ourselves feel better together. Now, I don't think this is going to be limited to romantic relationships. I think this is probably going to be a characteristic of close emotional relationships, such as you might have with friends, which explains my next clip, which is of a YouTube video of some young men in the former East Germany on making a video to promote their heavy metal band, and it's extremely macho and the mood is very serious, and I want you to notice what happens in terms of laughter when things go wrong and how quickly that happens and how that changes the mood. He's cold, he's about to get wet, he's got swimming trunks on, he's got a towel.

Ice. What might possibly happen Video starts Serious mood

Speaker 1: yeah, And my new band is called Seaskill.

Speaker 0: We're off. Waaah! And his friends are already laughing. They're already laughing hard. He's not laughing yet.

Speaker 1: I can't keep going.

Speaker 0: He's starting to go now. And now they're all off. The thing I really like about that is it's all very kind of serious until he jumps onto the ice and as soon as he doesn't go through the ice, but also there isn't blood and bone everywhere, his friends start laughing. And imagine if I'm played out with him, standing there going, no, seriously, Henrik, I think this is broken. And we wouldn't enjoy watching that, that would be stressful.

Or if he was running around with a visibly broken leg laughing and his friends all going, Henrik, I think we need to go to the hospital now, that also wouldn't be funny. The fact that the laughter works, it gets him from a painful, embarrassing, difficult situation into a funny situation, is what we're actually enjoying there. And I think that's a really interesting use, and it's actually happening all the time. So, for example, I can remember now something very much like this happening at my father's funeral. We weren't jumping around on the ice in our underpants.

We're not Canadian. But, But But But But But These events are always difficult. I had a relative who was being a bit difficult, my mum was not in a good place. And I can remember finding myself, just before the whole thing started, telling this story about something that happened in a 1970s sitcom. And even at the time, I thought, I don't know why I'm doing this.

And all I realized I was doing was I was coming up with something from somewhere I could use to make her laugh, together with me. It was a very basic reaction to show, on some reason, we can do this, we can laugh together, we're going to get through this, We're going to be OK. And in fact, all of us are doing this all the time. You do it so often, you don't even notice it. Everybody underestimates how often they laugh.

And you're doing something when you laugh with people that's actually letting you access a really ancient, evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds and clearly to regulate emotions, to make ourselves feel better. It's not something specific to humans, it's a really ancient behavior which really helps us regulate how we feel and makes us feel better. In other words, when it comes to laughter, you and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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Why we laugh | Sophie Scott