Laughter: A Scientific Investigation

Rating:
Summary: Widely Appealing/Useful Laughter Insight
Review: Despite not digging deeply into De Bono's lateral thinking/humor etc texts (?perhaps a style thing), I am very glad to have read the seemingly similar-topic 'Laughter' by Provine. It's not overstating to say that this book is probably relevant to all who deal with people (i.e. everyone)- addressing as it does conversations, relationships, family, mental & physical health, tickling fights (!), evolution, group dynamics, marketing and consumerism in the media and religion, and coaching performance.

The well referenced, very well written and approachable chapters span: introduction; philosophy and history; natural history; sound lab and opera; chimpanzee paleohumorology; ticklish relationships; contagious laughter and the brain; abnormal clinical laughter; health; and ten tips (find a friend, more is merrier, interpersonal contact, casual atmosphere, laugh-ready attitude, exploit contagious laughter, humorous materials, remove inhibitions, stage events, and tickle).

There are interesting clues about laughter and courtship (in 3745 lonely hearts adverts), and well as social/sexual rank in organizations and behavior in "laughter episodes"; as well as many other useful scientific, and sometimes counter-intuitive findings over a decade of `laughter research'.

Strengths include: the depth of fascinating historical, neuroscience, experimental, and contextual information; the superb approachable writing style; the fact that keenest intellects have theoretically grasped at defining the significance of laughter (from the ancient Greeks onwards); and the absolute relevance to almost all for this seemingly-peripheral neglected area of research work.

Certainly one of the best-written, supported, rigorous, entertaining and useful books that this reviewer has come across- and more useful that many `pop psychology' texts for understanding about the human condition, as well as laughter itself.

Rating:
Summary: No Laughing Matter
Review: Don't expect to get lots of laughs by just reading _Laughter: A Scientific Investigation_ (Viking) by Robert R. Provine. It's not merely that Provine is covering a serious subject. He is as good as his word: his book is a scientific investigation, and he is neuroscientist by profession who has done original research on laughter published in such non-newsstand rags as _Ethology_ and _Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society_. And it's not that Provine is an unentertaining, dour writer; he has a light touch, and good explicative skills, he is happy to share a joke, and his stories about some of the ways he has done experiments are funny. For instance, we can share his bemusement over his initial explorations of why people laugh; he got a group into a clinic and played them funny tapes. He failed to get anything but a few chuckles. It was his first demonstration that laughter was a social behavior, not a laboratory one. He went on to study people in social situations.

Similarly, the reason you can't expect to laugh much from reading Provine's book is found in the book itself. Laughter is not something you can most reliably expect to do alone reading a book; it is something we do as a social behavior. Its "sociality," the ratio of social to solitary performance of the act, is very high. Provine had his undergraduate students keep logs of their behavior, including laughing, and found that we are thirty times more likely to laugh when with someone else. Another study showed that eye contact between two companions increases the likelihood of laughter. Laughter has a nonlinguistic role of holding people together.

Provine writes about many other curious studies, about the illnesses that can impair or propagate laughter, about the neurological explorations of the under-researched universal behavior of tickling, about the physiology of laughter and speech, about laugh epidemics that can paralyze schools, and about the Pentecostals that get "drunk in the Spirit" with laugh sessions. Wide-ranging and entertaining, _Laughter_ provides us with interesting studies on something we take for granted, and gives insight on just how hard doing such studies can be because of the commonness of the phenomenon involved. Provine wisely does not concentrate on wit, humor, or the meaning of things that influence us to laugh. It's laughter itself that is the subject, and given the nature of the theme, one comes away with even more admiration for the subtlety, cleverness, and capacity of the human mind.

Rating:
Summary: A Waste Of Time
Review: I guess his idea was that there were no studies on laughter so he wrote a book telling someone else to do one. I'm not sure what the point was or why anyone would have published this book, it went no where, accomplished nothing and was thuroughly dissapointing. He raised good quesitons and never came close to answering any of them. I don't get it. The one thing he actually did that was interesting was when he studied when men and women laugh, I thought that was very insightful and now that I know the facts, I've watched it be true. Women laugh when they talk or when they hear, men don't think women are funny. I thought that was an interesting study. Otherwise, the book didn't quite tell me anything. After another ten years of study he could write a much better book.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, but probably not the book for everyone
Review: I thought this book was fantastic--but I probably approached it in a way different than the average reader would.

I'm a psychologist, like Provine, and humor has been a side interest for me during all of my 20 years in the field. I thought about studying humor when I was in graduate school, but chose to study memory instead, basically because I chickened out; I thought that humor was too hard. Indeed, I read most of the important works on humor and laughter and was not that impressed with the status of the field.

This is the best book on the subject I have ever read.

Provine takes the brilliantly simple approach of questioning whether or not we really know _when_ people laugh, instead of assuming that we know when and asking _why_. I (AND every psychologist and philosopher who has written on the subject) had assumed that we know when people laugh. Provine shows that we don't by doing observational studies of when people laugh. That alone would be worth following the author for a couple of hundred pages. Provine shows very clearly that laughter (1) has a social, communicative function, thus explaining the common (and this time correct) observation that you seldom laugh alone; (2) that laughter is usually NOT related to humor because it is not uttered in humorous situations; (3) that the person making a laugh-worthy comments laughs MORE than the person hearing that comment;

In addition Provine has some interesting speculation on the continuity of laughter from the great apes to humans.

This book is very different than the typical science trade book, as one might read by Steve Pinker, or James Gleick. It's not the type of book where a competent guide leads you through a simplified version of a very complex literature where great strides have been made. Rather, Laughter is a book of science in the making. It's not quite an academic treatise--you don't need much background to pick it up and read it. But be warned that it is not the kind of book where, once you finish it you'll say "Cool. So that's what laughter is all about." But if you are interested in humor or laughter, you may well find it rewarding.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: IMHO, this doesn't yield any valuable conceptual insights into humor.

If you're interested in the cognitive patterns behind jokes, comedy etc. you might want to check out Arthur Koestler's "Act of Creation" instead. He sets out to discover common patterns behind creative acts in humor, art and science and comes up with very broad original insights that I found very enlightening.

Another interesting (and more formalized) attempt to conceptualize creative thinking (including humor) is being developed by some cognitive linguists (Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner). Their concepts seem to go along very well with Koestler's findings. You might want to check out their book "The Way We Think".

Rating:
Summary: Laughter is caused by a stuttering brain
Review: Yes, yes, I know. Provine studied thousands of people but, what he failed to grasp is that laughter is the result of a "stuttering" brain. A person is confronted with anxiety and, the brain "stutters" and releases the vocalizations we call laughter. This brings the brain (rather mind) back into equilibrium and "solves" the dilemma . . .the anxiety.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Yes, yes, I know. Provine studied thousands of people but, what he failed to grasp is that laughter is the result of a "stuttering" brain. A person is confronted with anxiety and, the brain "stutters" and releases the vocalizations we call laughter. This brings the brain (rather mind) back into equilibrium and "solves" the dilemma . . .the anxiety.