Short Writing Assignment #2

Of all the readings we have done so far for this class, I am most interested in the reasons for laughter. I never paid attention to the reasons for laughter and just assumed people laughed because something was funny. I was very surprised to find out there are eight different reasons for laughter, with surprise and superiority as the two primary reasons. Under surprise and superiority there are six additional reasons for laughter which include instinct, release, incongruity, ambivalence, regress, and solving a puzzle.

Part of the reason I am interested in the reason we laugh is because it gives me something to think about when I hear a joke. After learning the reasons for laughter I can listen to a joke and decide if I laughed out of surprise, instinct, release, incongruity, superiority, ambivalence, regress, or because I solved a puzzle. Because of this I will probably not laugh as much and I will think about why I was laughing.

Knowing the reason for laughter is especially important for a comedian. If he wants to surprise the audience with the punch line, he will not be pleased if they laugh out of instinct. He wants to surprise them with his jokes and let that be the reason for their laughter. I think Mel Helitzer should have included the psychology behind the reasons for laughter. He mentioned the psychologist who identified the reasons for laughter, but he did not include how she discovered her findings. That is very important to me because I wonder if the findings were based on studying someone and looking at their personality to see why they laughed or if the findings were based on someone saying why they laughed.

I chose the article “Why We Laugh” by Morgan Griffin because Robert R. Provine, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland Baltimore Country, provides the psychological reasons to determine why people laugh. He conducted a survey of 1,200 “laugh episodes” by listening to conversations in public. He found that only 10-20% of laughs were in response to jokes and the other 80-90% of laughs came from comments that did not involve humor.

When Provine surveyed conversations in public, did he survey at random or did he visit one shopping mall and survey all males? We do not know who he surveyed and if his subjects were respresentative of the population. Depending on who he surveyed, his results may not be accurate.

http://men.webmd.com/features/why-we-laugh