Why we laugh? #stevenpinker #briangreene #laughter #humanity #psychology

When you have a bunch of friends together, there's a lot of laughter, but it's not like they're furiously telling jokes. And if you pay attention to the immediate antecedent to laughter, something that a psychologist named Robert Provine did, um, he actually went out in the field with a tape recorder and actually did something that didn't occur to anyone else to do before that in history, even though people have speculated about humor for centuries. He actually wanted to write down what makes people laugh. — What he found was there [clears throat] just minor indignities. um uh frustrations, breaches of decorum, acknowledgements, and that's typical laughter. And as a social lubricant, it establishes that everyone recognizes that everyone else is