Humor is deeply personal. A punchline or a pratfall that leaves one person doubled over in delight might elicit blank stares from another. But laughter is universal, an innate instinct shared by humans everywhere. And not just humans. Chimps chuckle, gorillas guffaw, bonobos bust a gut.
All the planet’s great apes laugh, and they often do so in the same kind of regular, repeating rhythm that humans do, scientists found in a small new study.
The research sheds light on how laughter evolved with and among great apes, becoming faster and more variable in humans than in these other primate species.
While nonhuman apes appeared to laugh in ways that were largely fixed, humans were more flexible in their expressions of mirth, changing up the tempo of their chuckles depending on the circumstance, the scientists found.
“I think we can say we are the masters of laughter,” said Chiara De Gregorio, a research fellow at the University of Warwick in Britain and an author of the study.
“We can have a small, polite laugh in front of the Queen of England, and then we are in the pub with our friends, and we laugh so much in a different way. We can even laugh in a way that communicates to the other person that we actually didn’t find the joke they said funny.
” This wide-ranging repertoire requires significant vocal flexibility and control — the same skills that humans would have needed for spoken language.
The study demonstrates the “uniqueness of human laughter,” said Greg Bryant, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the new research. “It provides a window into human vocal evolution. ” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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