Why do people laugh?

According to Psychology Today, “People laugh for various reasons, including social bonding, relief from stress, and the enjoyment of humor. Laughter serves as a universal form of communication that helps strengthen relationships and can even improve physical health.”

My Renton High School English teacher told my class that people laugh because they are surprised.

According to Scientific American author Einstein Sabrina Stierwalt in her February 3^rd, 2020 article entitled “Why Do We Laugh?”, infants laugh by the time they are three months old. Apes laugh. We know this because scientists tickle them and they respond with laughter. People of all cultures laugh, but for different reasons.

Social bonding: “Laughter clearly serves a social function. It is a way for us to signal to another person that we wish to connect with them… We’re also thirty times more likely to laugh in a group” (Stierwalt). Laughter can strengthen relationships.

Relieving stress and improving physical health through humor: “Laughing further releases endorphins, the feel-good chemicals our bodies produce to make us feel happy and even relieve pain or stress. The act of increasing and then decreasing our heart rate and blood pressure through laughter is also ultimately calming and tension-relieving” (Stierwalt).

Laughing out of surprise: Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson wrote in 1750 that “We laugh in surprise at ‘bringing resemblances from subjects of a quite different kind from the subject to which they are compared” (utas.edu.au). Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud observed that “We laugh because of a ‘surprising quality’ that ‘stems not from the revelation of the unknown, but from the unexpected look at the known’. We laugh because now we know we’re properly seeing the world as it is.”

When I was young, I wanted to be like my older brother who was funny and personable. He has an uncanny ability to make jokes. I wanted to be like him, but was a terrible joke teller. After years of trying to figure out how to make people laugh, I finally came to the conclusion that putting together two ideas that have no apparent connection surprises people.

Over my years of being a teacher, I learned that if I could get people laughing, they were more likely to listen more carefully and to accept what I share. I work at saying things in a way that makes people put two seemingly opposite ideas together. During every class presentation I create a contrast between what I am telling them with another perspective they may not have considered. I do this by having my students look at an event through the eyes of another person. That’s what late night comics do on their shows when they make comments from another perspective. As an example, comedian Jimmy Kimmel noted that the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to make Daylight Savings permanent, but the House never voted on it. Kimmel stated that Daylight Savings may be the only savings we have left, based on rising costs due to increased tariffs. Kimmel rephrased Daylight Savings from a political perspective, causing the audience to laugh.

Conservatives would likely see no humor in satire about tariffs. Anything can be made funny; but we need to be emotionally distant from it.

According to the website, the conversation.com, there are three theories about why we laugh. These are examples of surprising people into laughing:

“The oldest is ‘superiority theory’. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes explained in his 1651 book Leviathan we “maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER” when we realize we’re better off than someone else. We ‘suddenly applaud’ ourselves when we recognize our superiority.

Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson disagreed with Hobbes and suggested an alternative: “incongruity theory”.

In Reflections Upon Laughter (1750) he maintains we laugh in surprise at “bringing resemblances from subjects of a quite different kind from the subject to which they are compared’”.

Freud further observed in his book, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) that “our subconscious works to stop us from consciously understanding something that might be socially unacceptable. If we allow ourselves to acknowledge what we think we’re seeing, the energy we had been using to repress ourselves is then ‘discharged by laughter’”.

Humor is good for all of us. It creates social bonding, relieves stress, improves our physical wellbeing, and surprises us into seeing the world differently, making us smarter in the process.

As psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl noted: “The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.”

Words to laugh at and live by.