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mercurial
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Laugh and the world laughs with you. If what you’re laughing at is funny.
Nothing quite defines us like our sense of humour. It’s our facial uniform, what gives each of us our own identity.
It also helps us to ruthlessly select the people we want around us on a day-to-day basis.
If, for instance, you find yourself on a first date with someone and they casually utter, ‘I really enjoyed that episode of The Big Bang Theory,’ you can safely say they are not the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.
Of course, there are plenty of people out there who do enjoy The Big Bang Theory. And just because they are wrong doesn’t mean their sense of humour shouldn’t have its place.
When people say they have ‘a good sense of humour’, what they’re really saying is that they are good fun. When something is as relative as a sense of humour, perhaps having a good one isn’t possible.
And does it matter that what you find funny isn’t appreciated by the snobby laughter elite? Admitting you like Mrs Brown’s Boys is on a par with admitting you have leprosy, yet millions watch it and millions love it. A sense of humour shouldn’t be cool, it should be instinctive. Mainly because your body knows when you are faking it.
Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, has carried out a number of studies into laughter.
He said laughter helps release endorphins in the body which act as a natural painkiller, but only the genuine, unforced kind of uncontrollable laughter which comes with real amusement – not the forced kind of polite titter which we make when pretending to find one of our colleagues’ jokes funny. Laughter also builds up our immune systems.
Perhaps it’s not the best medicine, but it is an effective one.
Prof Dunbar said human laughter evolved from the noises made by great apes while they played together.
‘It is clearly the same vocalisation that we use in laughter but it’s just structured slightly differently,’ he said.
‘They exhale and then they suck the breath back in. What we’ve done is cut out the inhalation part, so instead of being a series of exhalations and inhalations, for us it’s just become exhalation, exhalation, exhalation – ha, ha, ha!
‘And what that does is empty the lungs and that’s why it produces this endorphin surge because it’s very stressful on the chest. That’s where the expression, “I laughed until it hurt”, comes from. In the end, you empty the lungs completely because you can’t control yourself.’
He said our individual sense of humour is influenced by our friends and the experiences we have. Our sense of humour evolves over time depending on what we watch, who we see and what we find funny.
But do we need to laugh at all? Couldn’t we just go through life with empty expressions on our faces?
‘It’s critical in building a social life and we are very social creatures,’ said Prof Dunbar. ‘So, if you don’t have friends and good relationships then you end up in a downward spiral.
‘We pepper our conversations with one-liners. People who are good at telling jokes become very attractive as social partners.’
Try telling that to comedian and Metro columnist Richard Herring.
‘My wife finds a lot of the stuff I think is funny very tedious,’ he said. ‘Though I hope she still finds me funny on the whole. I’d be worried if everyone did find me funny, to be honest.’
He said laughter is a social tool which brings us closer together and extends our existence.
‘If you want to get through life and be happy and experience the minimum of stress then it’s vital.
‘To be able to laugh in the face of the horrible stuff that goes on in our lives is something that keeps us sane and relatively happy. Laughter isn’t the best medicine – actual medicine has a better track record – but being able to laugh at stuff certainly gives you a better chance of a long life.
‘Laughter is an antidote to fear, the moment we realise something strange or dangerous is actually harmless.’
[video=youtube;0A5t5_O8hdA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0A5t5_O8hdA[/video]
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