Could laughter be the root of good culture?

Go deep with the happiness playlist

Transcript

Now, if you’ve not already subscribed, there’s a weekly email that goes out with the podcast, and this week’s included a brilliant article on how teams that are small seem to be more radical. There’s also a couple of discussions about the work of. Professor Adam Grant, who’s been a former guest on the show, but he’s incredibly prolific and there’s a really good article on laughter in Teams.

And the Laughter in Teams article is from some research that NASA is looking at when it comes to casting their first expeditions to Mars. NASA looked at the success of different teams in isolation in Antarctica, and it seemed that when there’s a joker in the team, someone gifted in the art of Lightning, the mood, it helps improve the overall morale of the team.

So I found that fascinating in the joy of work. I talked about how the successful Cambridge boat race team, I think in 2008, whose performance was transformed from losing a practice tie to winning the boat race when they promoted a funny colleague to the boat. And that was interesting because he wasn’t by any stretch the best performing athlete, but they all just felt themselves to be better in an, in a better mental state when he was present.

So interesting research on that one. And it’s a really neglected component of a happy team. If you’ve read the Joy of Work, I’m obsessed with it. So it leads us onto today’s guest, Robert Provine’s 2000 book. Laughter is a real page turner of research about one of the most enjoyable, but least.

Studied aspect of modern life, and he’s gone on to cover laughter and other human behaviors in his 2013 book. Curious Behavior, yawning, laughing, hiccuping and Beyond. Provan is the world’s expert on the subject. When we talked to Professor Sophie Scott in the live episode of laughter at Work this time last year, she mentioned Professor Provin several times, and I love the fact that he was the main consultant on products like Tickle Me Elmo.

So there’s a fascinating discussion. Laughter seems to be a signal of a couple of things, safety and play, and he makes a really interesting point at the end about the current state of politics being filled with the opposite of laughter, which is fear and anger. There was a really interesting exercise a few years ago, and this was called out and mentioned in Dan Lyon’s recent book Lab Rats, but the EXOS was conducted by Dan Arieli and it looked at the data from an organization called Great Place to Work.

Ali wanted to see if they had anything that correlated with stock data. So he wanted to see if there was any sort of thing in the great place to work data that would allow him to invest in better firms and get an investment advice from that. And he took a look. Great place to work, has been running these experiments since 1981.

So they had masses of data and lots of different companies and he looked through all of it. And there was one factor that leapt out. There was one thing that seemed to correlate with good investment decisions, but it was an odd thing. It was safety. And companies where people consistently reported feeling safe to safe at work tended to outperform the stock market average, sometimes by 200%.

And it applied to emotional and physical safety. The other thing that seemed to correlate actually was a strong sense of welcome. Now, if you listen to Professor Provin talking about laughter could be in service of all of those things, right? Making us feel safe. Maybe laughter’s like the secret ingredient to show that there’s psychological safety, but also it’s really helps forge a strong sense of welcome.

Really interesting that I, for me, if you are looking at those things that seem to correlate with success, 200% outperformance of the stock market, laughter might be one of the things that helps us get there. Fascinating. So let’s introduce him. Professor Robert Provin is a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Mary Land in Baltimore.

I called him on the phone to pick his brain. Here’s our chat.

Professor Provin I’m so thrilled to talk to you. We’ve been trying to set this up for 12 months, so it is great to finally get the chance to chat to you. I wonder if we could kick off by, I wonder if you could introduce yourself to us. 

Robert Provine: Yeah. I’m Robert Proman. I’m a professor of Psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

I have broad interests from electrophysiology and neuroanatomy to everyday behavior and of people in public places. 

Bruce Daisley: And the thing I was taking I was really captivated by your wonderful book Laughter, which is which is probably 15, 18 years old now. But I just wonder if we could kick off by talking through firstly, one of the things you addressed, I think, in the book is that laughter’s not that well studied.

Is it? It’s not certainly compared to depression and anxiety, there’s not a lot of scientific papers on it. Why do you think that’s the case? 

Robert Provine: The history of laughter study actually is rather old in that some of the oldest scholarly works, dating from Plato, you can’t get much older than that.

Have very much concerned with laughter, so philosophers. I’ve very much been concerned with laughter and its important in life. For example, Plato Aristotle and, great people throughout history have been concerned with it. But their approach was basically to try to reason through it.

And one of the, my motives for. Writing a book about it is that it’s I think not very profitable to try to rationalize the irrational. If you wanna understand laughter, you have to describe what it is and when we do it. And when you look at those things, it leads you to a very different place. Then the philosopher’s musings.

And that was a motive for writing the book because simply a short paper wasn’t enough to try to establish a kind of new synthesis, a new way of looking at this everyday behavior. 

Bruce Daisley: And you set out at the outset, I think probably understandably, you set out to try and capture moments of laughter and you brought people into the lab, or you brought people into the environment and tried to make them laugh.

And that proved difficult. Do you wanna explain how you went from that experiment and then what you ended up doing? 

Robert Provine: Yeah, my research was really a ch a series of what seemed to initially be failures, but they were really successes that I just didn’t rec recognize their importance at the time.

For example, I decided well look at the kinds of things, for example, jokes that get people to laugh and then study the laughter. And what I found was that it’s hard to get people to laugh in the laboratory. And this again, was a kind of disappointment. It was a kind of failure how can I say, a behavior if I’m having trouble getting people to do it.

Then it occurred to me, wait this is really a success. I learned that if you want to look at this, the communication between people you need to get out of the lab and look at the interactions between between people in everyday life. This was a kind of novel approach to me who has traditionally been a rather lab bound scientist.

Okay. So I went out to look at laughter in public places, and there I was met with another surprise, another disappointment that a success in disguise. What I found was that what I wanted to steady what happened before people left. One of the things that I found was, wait, the person talking to another person is actually laughing more than the person they’re talking to.

And I said, oh no, this is a big problem. What am I gonna do? And then I discovered. That on average speakers actually laugh more than the person they’re speaking to that hadn’t been understood previously. 

Bruce Daisley: And why was that the case? Because you’re exactly right. It would be, it’d be counter to what we’d expect if someone described you a scene where the speaker was laughing more.

I think we often imagine that speakers laugh less right. Than the audience. 

Robert Provine: Yeah. It’s because we have this, I think, an inappropriate scenario. A standup comedy is a model for everyday laughter, and that fails in a number of counts. For example, standup comedy where you have a comedian telling jokes to an audience that laughs a good comedic performer’s not supposed to laugh themselves.

Okay? Everyday behavior. 

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. 

Robert Provine: Shows that you know well both speaker and laugh and audience laugh a lot. The speaker actually on average laughed somewhat more. So that was a surprise. There. There was another way in which we found that standup comedy was a bad model for everyday behavior.

People think, oh, you laugh because someone does something funny. Course saying something funny is not very informative. It just means something funny, something that made you laugh. But typically think a person did something humorous, something jokey. And when we observed what was said before most laughter occurs is that it wasn’t a joke.

In fact, only maybe 10 or 15% of all pre last comments were anything that seemed to be remotely joke like. You, this was a, another surprise, and I think, wait, we didn’t miss something. This is not a one of those times where you think you had to be there. If you were there, you would’ve seen, there’s all these other kinds of subtle cues, and that’s not really the case.

You can test this as well as a number of other things that we’re going to discuss. You don’t have to take my word for it. Since we, our lives are full of laughter simply observe when you left, why you left. And I think you can either confirm or disprove some of the things that we’re discussing.

Bruce Daisley: I think it, so I certainly recognize that with the list of phrases that you gave and I immediately, it was things like, your turn next or Good luck with that, or we’ll see. And and immediately I recognized, yeah, they’re exactly the sort of things that people say. You know that maybe a meeting’s just broken up.

People will say something and exactly as you say, it’s not a funny thing, but we seem to activate laughter. 

Robert Provine: Yeah, it’s our lives are full of things like, Hey, Bruce, where you been? Things like that. Again, just observe. You know what you do and you laugh and you find that you can be at a party and the party’s full of laughing people, but people are not telling each other jokes at a furious rate.

Other research that I’d done indicated that the critical ingredient for laughter is relationship, other people, not jokes. For example, we laugh 30 times more often when we’re around other people than when we’re alone. When you’re by yourself, laughter virtually disappears. Those cases where you laugh when you’re alone are things like you think of something that happened in interactions with other people.

You’re reading about people in a book you’re listening to the radio. You are listening to podcasts, watching the television, and you laugh. You’re laughing at the people in the box. But if you take away those sources of vicarious social stimulation, laughter disappears again 30 times more often in social and solitary situations.

So if you want laughter, you have to be around other people. 

Bruce Daisley: And you’ve also studied something else, which is a sort of contagious human phenomenon, which is yawning. And what would you say then, having studied both are the connections between laughter and yawning? 

Robert Provine: I studied them both because they’re related.

They’re both human instincts. You don’t have to learn to yawn, you don’t have to learn to laugh. They just n naturally develop. They’re also both contagious in that we laugh when we hear other people laugh. That’s the reason why you have laugh tracks and television situation comedies, and you also yawn when you see other people yawn or talk about yawning like we’re doing right now.

Or listening to a yawn. Okay. It’s very potent. But laughter, contagious. Laughter occurs almost instantly when you hear laughter. Yawning can occur several seconds later, but I considered both lines of investigation to be simpler in the sense that I was looking at basically, how the brain works, the relationship between brain and behavior.

And I decided these were the two of the most rigorous and also neglected approaches to the topic. By looking at contagion, that we have a bridge between neuroscience and the social sciences. Something that’s in, definitely in short supply. So when we laugh, when we hear other people laugh, we don’t decide, oh, I wanna laugh too.

It just happens. And in both cases, we don’t laugh. Usually because we want to laugh. We don’t yawn because we want to yawn. It simply happens, so we go laughing our way through life. Obeying a kind of instinctive biological script. We have this notion that we’re rational beings in total voluntary control over behavior, but laughter like yawning shows that this isn’t true.

For example, if you ask I’ll ask you right now, will you laugh for me? Please? 

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. You know that it’s gonna be an uncomfortable artificial laugh. In fact, even the thought of just trying to do it now makes me feel uncomfortable. 

Robert Provine: Yeah. Most people, about half people will say I can’t laugh in command, and the other half will try and fail rather miserably.

Instead of giving you something like, ha. Okay. Not convincing actors, of course, are gonna be better at this. Throughout the years from the ancient philosophers to the present, there’s this notion that. Laughter we speak haha. The way we would speak a word in speech, and this is clearly not the case because for example, will you say, haha, 

Bruce Daisley: haha, 

Robert Provine: okay, that’s easy.

But if you ask someone to laugh, you’re gonna find that most can’t do it persuasively. So we go through life laughing our way through life. It’s not under conscious control. We are not the rational beings. We fancy ourselves to be. 

Bruce Daisley: So let’s so what, so why are we doing it? Is it about synchronizing ourselves with people around us?

Why would we have these involuntary reactions? 

Robert Provine: We are synchronizing ourselves with others. Whether we yawn. When you see another person yawn or laugh, when we hear another person laugh, we’re bonding with that other individual. So this is the kind of behavior that bonds us and promotes relationships.

Laughter brings us together. Again, much of the talk about. Laughing our way to health and so on, which is an iffy thing. I think. Clearly a life well lived is going to be full of laughter, but is laughter going to make us happy? Is laughter gonna make us healthy? Perhaps not. Maybe healthy people simply laugh more.

But if we ask the question, what is laughter? It suggests some important things here. Laughter is the sound of play. If we trace the evolution of laughter from our ancient primate relatives, and we can do this by studying chimpanzees and other great apes, they too laugh if you tickle a chimpanzee. They tickle each other.

They produce their version of the laugh, which I’ll provide a version of this. Seeing that humans are one of, are a really, a chimpanzee in good standing. I’m qualified to do this. Here’s a chimpanzee laugh. It’s a kind of panning sound. Okay? It sounds different than human laughter in that if you take that sound and you play it to an audience, a naive audience doesn’t know what the sound is, and ask ’em what they’re hearing.

No one volunteers their hearing laughter. They may say, I’m listening to panting, maybe a dog. I listening to people having sex. Some people say it, it sounds like sanding or sawing. Anyway, that gives us a hint. First of all other animals laugh, but they laugh with somewhat different vocalization. In those cases, it’s like pant.

Pant as a chimpanzee Laughter. 

Bruce Daisley: Ah, 

Robert Provine: they make one sound per inward and outward breath. This is different. This evolved in the human laughter where we chop an outward breath. So pant became ha. So in humans, our ha sound that involves the chopping, the parsing of an outward breath, just as I’m talking to you now, chimpanzees don’t laugh that way.

They make one sound for inward and outward breath. In fact, contrasting human and chimpanzee laughter may indicate why we can talk and they can’t. They don’t have sufficient breath control to modulate an outward breath. In the contentious area of ape language, everyone agrees that you can’t teach a chimp to talk.

You can teach ’em to sign that you can’t teach them to talk. The reason is they can’t make the fancy sounds like I’m talking to you right now, is parsing an outward breath to make sounds. They can’t do it. Who would’ve guessed that breath control is the reason. The key to the reason why we can talk and other animals can’t is breath control and laughter provided the key.

Who would’ve guessed 

Bruce Daisley: And tell me though the, I think the way that you describe it in the book is that you say effectively then, whether it’s chimpanzees or whether it’s humans effectively, then the there seems to be a function served by laughing and it seems to be to some extent, showing each other that the safety there.

And you mentioned play, but you describe laughter us. As closer to an impoverished human song, like a, a bird song. Do you wanna just explain why, what you mean by that? 

Robert Provine: Yeah, LA laughter. Laughter is a species typical meaning that all members of our species do it. It’s a play vocalization it, it’s a signal that I wanna play with you.

I’m not attacking you. So in chimps, they make this, ah. Actually, dogs make a kind of panning sound like that too, when they wanna play. So the sound of laughter really started out as the sound of labored breathing during rough and tumble play, and then the sound of labored breathing became the signal for play.

And that’s the signal that chimps, for example, sent to each other. In our case, it’s one step removed. So instead of going pant the way our ancestors did, we go, ha. And that’s a symbol that I wanna play. So laughter is really the sound of play. And when you hear laughter, you have, cases where people are playing with each other, whether it’s the more physical, rough and tumble of childhood, or its adult play more often happens in the arena of conversation.

In regard to the workplace, for example, if you have people laughing in the workplace, this means that they’re in a playful mood, they’re having fun and also will indicate they’re around other people. So when you find laughter, whether it’s in the workplace or someplace else, it means play is happening and another person is present.

Bruce Daisley: Explain. So connect those two things for me. ’cause I can definitely see laughter working in a scenario of playing. But you also said that. We find ourselves laughing in work environments where nothing funny has taken place. So is it because we’re trying to reactivate that sense of playful safeness, is there a, are they different or the same?

The notion of play and the notion of safety. 

Robert Provine: They’re related, for example, some play could involve, risk and physicality and other kind of things. But the key is that when you laugh, you’re basically producing this ancient vocalization that’s play. It has to do with relationships with another person.

It’s not related to jokes. And also you don’t have voluntary control over it. For example, a lot of people will talk about, I laugh for this reason or that reason. I think basically that’s just an attempt to create an account, a kind of post hoc account for why we did something. But you’re trying to rationalize the irrational a better approach than the one that I’ve taken in my research is basically simply observe what people do.

Don’t ask them why they did it, because first of all, they don’t know and you’re not gonna get good information about that. They may say, oh, I laughed because I was nervous. I laughed to put someone else at ease, whatever. And I think, no, none of those things are really true. That’s just an attempt to try to explain what you did, because people are not willing to accept the fact that it just happened.

Suggesting that something just happened doesn’t mean that there is not a script, a kind of underlying lawfulness of it. I think that is one of the exciting things that, I learned in pursuing this is we humans in our are not like a captain of our ship guiding ourselves through the shoals, avoiding icebergs and so on.

Basically all this is happening at an unconscious level. Of course, just because it’s unconscious doesn’t mean that it’s not lawful, it’s not predictable. 

Bruce Daisley: I, once we’ve established that serving a role in a work environment where it’s signaling safety it’s to some extent sort of forging a sink, forging a connection with other people.

Is there anything that we and you’d presume that all of those things are desirable in a work environment. Is there anything we can do to. Stimulate more laughter. 

Robert Provine: Yeah, if you want more laughter, you need to be around people and you need to be in a lower pressure, playful environment. The situation that produces the most laughter actually is a male talking to a female.

The female audience laughs the most, also females talking to males. Laugh more than a male talking to a female. 

Bruce Daisley: Hang on. So there’s something in that, right? So firstly, why do females laugh more than males? And secondly, is there a power thing in the way that laughter is distributed then? 

Robert Provine: Yeah, there may be.

But as in my other work, I didn’t start off with any kind of assumption. I just observed what’s happening, for example, worldwide. And a lot of my results have been replicated in other culture almost exactly. We find is, for example, class clowns in school are almost always male. Also if you look at everyday life, you know who talks and who laughs.

The people talking that’s most reliably followed by laughter are males. So both males and females laugh more when a male than a female is talking to them. But then again, since laughter is not consciously controlled, this isn’t an issue where males decide, I’m not gonna laugh when a woman’s talking to them.

It just happens and it may very well reflect power relationships. 

Bruce Daisley: I remember reading General Schwartzkoff the the sort of the former leader of the US military, and he said that he was by any account a deeply unfunny man. He said, I’ve never said anything funny until the day I became commander in chief.

Or the commander of the US forties. And then it appeared like I was the funniest man in the world. And he re he’s related a story of how everywhere he went, if he said something that was even moderately funny, it would generate laughter from lots of people. So there, there does seem to be something doesn’t there in the fact that we tend to laugh around people who are in a more elevated status than us.

Robert Provine: Yeah. And it’s always safer to laugh with people in power than laugh at them, so if they’re making an effort of humor, everyone else is gonna help them along. Also a given person can have a very different kind of laugh life in different context, you know, for example. A person in position of power could be a prime minister, for example.

That person is going to have a very different audience reaction when they’re in that role, as opposed to talking to some of their old school mates when they were at university, for example. So you might be laughing along with your old pals, but in the position of authority, there may be a lot less laughter except laughing with, laughter is downward.

Typically. For example, a person in power can make fun. For example the unfortunate American president we have is very good at ridicule, so has no sense of irony and no sense of self-deprecation. Okay, 

Bruce Daisley: so I was gonna come onto to him because in James Comey’s book about his time being the FBI director he takes several pages to talk about Donald Trump and how he says that he worked.

Comey says he worked directly with George W. Bush. He worked directly with Obama, and he said both of them used laughter to relax a room to make people feel. At ease speaking up, they used laughter to ridicule themselves to, to level the hierarchy in a room. And Comey observes in the whole time that he was with Trump.

He never saw him laugh, but when he did laugh, it was always ridiculing people. Do you wanna just explain that then? 

Robert Provine: Yeah. Also there was a amusing incident with Trump speaking to the United Nations last year. When he was talking about he had the most successful American ad administration for the first two years in history, and the audience laughed at him.

That’s right. And I think he could relate to that. Basically he doesn’t have a category for that, yeah I’m afraid irony has died. 

Bruce Daisley: He was completely bemused by it, wasn’t he? He didn’t quite understand.

Robert Provine: Yeah. He, it, he just stopped and I forget exactly what he said, 

Bruce Daisley: but he says, you laugh.

That’s fine. That’s fine. It was something like that. He couldn’t, it was like this real dissonance in his head. He couldn’t quite take it in, could he? 

Robert Provine: No, he couldn’t. But that’s an important part of, again, the just as talking with listening to other people and laughing along with ’em is an important part of bonding.

That’s a difference between bonding and pontificating. 

Bruce Daisley: Which, which I guess explains in James Comey’s description, it explains how George W. Bush and president Obama used laughter. They used laughter as a way to relax the people around them, to, to some extent build a bit of psychological safety to the people would feel more comfortable in, in contributing.

And they seem to use laughter in a classic way. 

Robert Provine: Yeah, in my book, I talked about for example, American presidents who were particularly adept at this and actually one of the first American presidents to hold a television, press conference. And of course he did it because he was good at it and the press loved them was John F.

Kennedy. He was funny, and yet it didn’t diminish his, role as leader. It’s a delicate line. You mentioned Schwartzkoff, how many general funny generals are there? American Generals may be very funny when they’re talking about some of their old buddies back at West Point, but they’re not funny as commander, basically there you’re not looking for so much relationships as general means that basically you have general responsibilities.

There’s the weight of commands, so they’re basically telling you people what to do and they better do it. 

Bruce Daisley: Because la laughter also seems to activate creativity, or in, in what I saw was that it seems to, maybe it’s back to that sense of play, actually, maybe that’s why it’s by making people more relaxed, they seem to be more willing to.

Expose themselves and give more expansive ideas. 

Robert Provine: Yeah. I think that you’re gonna be more creative in the workplace if you see the work as an extension of play as opposed to just turning the crank. And I think for example again laughter is a a sign that play is going on in the work environment, and that’s a positive thing.

And as opposed to a lot of people who’ve seen traditionally laughter as something that, like we can laugh or a way to health. I think, which is a more tenuous proposition, and I’m certainly not arguing against laughter if you’re feeling poorly, where laughter may be beneficial. But maybe since laughter is a sign of social relationships, maybe we’ve misplaced our priorities.

Maybe if laughter does contribute to good health, it’s ’cause laughing people are engaged in playful relationships. So there’s the social component as well as the play component. Yeah. I don’t mean to be the skunk at the tea party here. I’d say laughter feels good when we do it.

Isn’t that enough? Does it have to cure cancer or make your kidney disease go away? I think. And to the extent in which it may contribute to good health, it may be simply the role of play and the role of relationships. Okay. 

Bruce Daisley: Okay. So it’s almost like it’s laughter exists in a relaxed environment and a relaxed environment might lead to better health.

The notion that you can laugh your way to good health is probably is probably a leap too far. 

Robert Provine: Yes. I believe it is. 

Bruce Daisley: Tell me this in the, it’s been, it’s been one of the things you’ve studied, but would you say that in. In the world we live in now, laughter is less frequent or certainly the reason I enter that with a vested interest.

I, I feel that people laugh less at work now than they might have done in the past. And I’m not sure if that’s me romanticizing that or, having rose into glassies looking at the past. What’s your view on it? 

Robert Provine: I believe that you’re probably right there. My guess is that serious science, I’m not talking about simply competence, but people that are really working at the frontiers of their discipline.

We’re talking about a work week that probably starts at 60 to 80 hours a week. And of course there’s some hardcore techies that say, commitment starts at a hundred hours a week. And there’s a lot of people that do that. That’s a challenging thing. Also, I find political environment, we talk about whether it’s national socialist in Germany or the Soviet regime.

Or could it even have more democratic regimes these days? Whether it be May in the UK or Trump especially, for example, Trump basically bases his power base depends upon fear and anger. And fear and anger are not conducive to laughter, except the occasional ridicule.

Bruce Daisley: We covered a lot there, right? If you’re interested in this, do check out Professor Provo’s books, laughter and Curious Behavior. They’re both worth checking out if you’ve enjoyed this. Please do give us a rating at Apple Podcasts. I never peed all that enough, but Apple Podcast is a racket where unless you unless you’re trying to get ratings all the time, you slip down the charts if you’ve enjoyed it.

So do give us a rating and recommend it to a friend. You can always connect to me on LinkedIn or you can sign up for our email and you’ll find that with all the podcast episodes at Eat, sleep, work, repeat fm. You can sign up and receive that email now. Thank you for listening. See you next time.

Hello there. This is Eat Sleep Worker, Pete. I’m Bruce Daisy. It’s a podcast about making work better.

Now, if you’ve not already subscribed, there’s a weekly email that goes out with the podcast, and this week’s included a brilliant article on how teams that are small seem to be more radical. There’s also a couple of discussions about the work of. Professor Adam Grant, who’s been a former guest on the show, but he’s incredibly prolific and there’s a really good article on laughter in Teams.

And the Laughter in Teams article is from some research that NASA is looking at when it comes to casting their first expeditions to Mars. NASA looked at the success of different teams in isolation in Antarctica, and it seemed that when there’s a joker in the team, someone gifted in the art of Lightning, the mood, it helps improve the overall morale of the team.

So I found that fascinating in the joy of work. I talked about how the successful Cambridge boat race team, I think in 2008, whose performance was transformed from losing a practice tie to winning the boat race when they promoted a funny colleague to the boat. And that was interesting because he wasn’t by any stretch the best performing athlete, but they all just felt themselves to be better in an, in a better mental state when he was present.

So interesting research on that one. And it’s a really neglected component of a happy team. If you’ve read the Joy of Work, I’m obsessed with it. So it leads us onto today’s guest, Robert Provine’s 2000 book. Laughter is a real page turner of research about one of the most enjoyable, but least.

Studied aspect of modern life, and he’s gone on to cover laughter and other human behaviors in his 2013 book. Curious Behavior, yawning, laughing, hiccuping and Beyond. Provan is the world’s expert on the subject. When we talked to Professor Sophie Scott in the live episode of laughter at Work this time last year, she mentioned Professor Provin several times, and I love the fact that he was the main consultant on products like Tickle Me Elmo.

So there’s a fascinating discussion. Laughter seems to be a signal of a couple of things, safety and play, and he makes a really interesting point at the end about the current state of politics being filled with the opposite of laughter, which is fear and anger. There was a really interesting exercise a few years ago, and this was called out and mentioned in Dan Lyon’s recent book Lab Rats, but the EXOS was conducted by Dan Arieli and it looked at the data from an organization called Great Place to Work.

Ali wanted to see if they had anything that correlated with stock data. So he wanted to see if there was any sort of thing in the great place to work data that would allow him to invest in better firms and get an investment advice from that. And he took a look. Great place to work, has been running these experiments since 1981.

So they had masses of data and lots of different companies and he looked through all of it. And there was one factor that leapt out. There was one thing that seemed to correlate with good investment decisions, but it was an odd thing. It was safety. And companies where people consistently reported feeling safe to safe at work tended to outperform the stock market average, sometimes by 200%.

And it applied to emotional and physical safety. The other thing that seemed to correlate actually was a strong sense of welcome. Now, if you listen to Professor Provin talking about laughter could be in service of all of those things, right? Making us feel safe. Maybe laughter’s like the secret ingredient to show that there’s psychological safety, but also it’s really helps forge a strong sense of welcome.

Really interesting that I, for me, if you are looking at those things that seem to correlate with success, 200% outperformance of the stock market, laughter might be one of the things that helps us get there. Fascinating. So let’s introduce him. Professor Robert Provin is a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Mary Land in Baltimore.

I called him on the phone to pick his brain. Here’s our chat.

Professor Provin I’m so thrilled to talk to you. We’ve been trying to set this up for 12 months, so it is great to finally get the chance to chat to you. I wonder if we could kick off by, I wonder if you could introduce yourself to us. 

Robert Provine: Yeah. I’m Robert Proman. I’m a professor of Psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

I have broad interests from electrophysiology and neuroanatomy to everyday behavior and of people in public places. 

Bruce Daisley: And the thing I was taking I was really captivated by your wonderful book Laughter, which is which is probably 15, 18 years old now. But I just wonder if we could kick off by talking through firstly, one of the things you addressed, I think, in the book is that laughter’s not that well studied.

Is it? It’s not certainly compared to depression and anxiety, there’s not a lot of scientific papers on it. Why do you think that’s the case? 

Robert Provine: The history of laughter study actually is rather old in that some of the oldest scholarly works, dating from Plato, you can’t get much older than that.

Have very much concerned with laughter, so philosophers. I’ve very much been concerned with laughter and its important in life. For example, Plato Aristotle and, great people throughout history have been concerned with it. But their approach was basically to try to reason through it.

And one of the, my motives for. Writing a book about it is that it’s I think not very profitable to try to rationalize the irrational. If you wanna understand laughter, you have to describe what it is and when we do it. And when you look at those things, it leads you to a very different place. Then the philosopher’s musings.

And that was a motive for writing the book because simply a short paper wasn’t enough to try to establish a kind of new synthesis, a new way of looking at this everyday behavior. 

Bruce Daisley: And you set out at the outset, I think probably understandably, you set out to try and capture moments of laughter and you brought people into the lab, or you brought people into the environment and tried to make them laugh.

And that proved difficult. Do you wanna explain how you went from that experiment and then what you ended up doing? 

Robert Provine: Yeah, my research was really a ch a series of what seemed to initially be failures, but they were really successes that I just didn’t rec recognize their importance at the time.

For example, I decided well look at the kinds of things, for example, jokes that get people to laugh and then study the laughter. And what I found was that it’s hard to get people to laugh in the laboratory. And this again, was a kind of disappointment. It was a kind of failure how can I say, a behavior if I’m having trouble getting people to do it.

Then it occurred to me, wait this is really a success. I learned that if you want to look at this, the communication between people you need to get out of the lab and look at the interactions between between people in everyday life. This was a kind of novel approach to me who has traditionally been a rather lab bound scientist.

Okay. So I went out to look at laughter in public places, and there I was met with another surprise, another disappointment that a success in disguise. What I found was that what I wanted to steady what happened before people left. One of the things that I found was, wait, the person talking to another person is actually laughing more than the person they’re talking to.

And I said, oh no, this is a big problem. What am I gonna do? And then I discovered. That on average speakers actually laugh more than the person they’re speaking to that hadn’t been understood previously. 

Bruce Daisley: And why was that the case? Because you’re exactly right. It would be, it’d be counter to what we’d expect if someone described you a scene where the speaker was laughing more.

I think we often imagine that speakers laugh less right. Than the audience. 

Robert Provine: Yeah. It’s because we have this, I think, an inappropriate scenario. A standup comedy is a model for everyday laughter, and that fails in a number of counts. For example, standup comedy where you have a comedian telling jokes to an audience that laughs a good comedic performer’s not supposed to laugh themselves.

Okay? Everyday behavior. 

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. 

Robert Provine: Shows that you know well both speaker and laugh and audience laugh a lot. The speaker actually on average laughed somewhat more. So that was a surprise. There. There was another way in which we found that standup comedy was a bad model for everyday behavior.

People think, oh, you laugh because someone does something funny. Course saying something funny is not very informative. It just means something funny, something that made you laugh. But typically think a person did something humorous, something jokey. And when we observed what was said before most laughter occurs is that it wasn’t a joke.

In fact, only maybe 10 or 15% of all pre last comments were anything that seemed to be remotely joke like. You, this was a, another surprise, and I think, wait, we didn’t miss something. This is not a one of those times where you think you had to be there. If you were there, you would’ve seen, there’s all these other kinds of subtle cues, and that’s not really the case.

You can test this as well as a number of other things that we’re going to discuss. You don’t have to take my word for it. Since we, our lives are full of laughter simply observe when you left, why you left. And I think you can either confirm or disprove some of the things that we’re discussing.

Bruce Daisley: I think it, so I certainly recognize that with the list of phrases that you gave and I immediately, it was things like, your turn next or Good luck with that, or we’ll see. And and immediately I recognized, yeah, they’re exactly the sort of things that people say. You know that maybe a meeting’s just broken up.

People will say something and exactly as you say, it’s not a funny thing, but we seem to activate laughter. 

Robert Provine: Yeah, it’s our lives are full of things like, Hey, Bruce, where you been? Things like that. Again, just observe. You know what you do and you laugh and you find that you can be at a party and the party’s full of laughing people, but people are not telling each other jokes at a furious rate.

Other research that I’d done indicated that the critical ingredient for laughter is relationship, other people, not jokes. For example, we laugh 30 times more often when we’re around other people than when we’re alone. When you’re by yourself, laughter virtually disappears. Those cases where you laugh when you’re alone are things like you think of something that happened in interactions with other people.

You’re reading about people in a book you’re listening to the radio. You are listening to podcasts, watching the television, and you laugh. You’re laughing at the people in the box. But if you take away those sources of vicarious social stimulation, laughter disappears again 30 times more often in social and solitary situations.

So if you want laughter, you have to be around other people. 

Bruce Daisley: And you’ve also studied something else, which is a sort of contagious human phenomenon, which is yawning. And what would you say then, having studied both are the connections between laughter and yawning? 

Robert Provine: I studied them both because they’re related.

They’re both human instincts. You don’t have to learn to yawn, you don’t have to learn to laugh. They just n naturally develop. They’re also both contagious in that we laugh when we hear other people laugh. That’s the reason why you have laugh tracks and television situation comedies, and you also yawn when you see other people yawn or talk about yawning like we’re doing right now.

Or listening to a yawn. Okay. It’s very potent. But laughter, contagious. Laughter occurs almost instantly when you hear laughter. Yawning can occur several seconds later, but I considered both lines of investigation to be simpler in the sense that I was looking at basically, how the brain works, the relationship between brain and behavior.

And I decided these were the two of the most rigorous and also neglected approaches to the topic. By looking at contagion, that we have a bridge between neuroscience and the social sciences. Something that’s in, definitely in short supply. So when we laugh, when we hear other people laugh, we don’t decide, oh, I wanna laugh too.

It just happens. And in both cases, we don’t laugh. Usually because we want to laugh. We don’t yawn because we want to yawn. It simply happens, so we go laughing our way through life. Obeying a kind of instinctive biological script. We have this notion that we’re rational beings in total voluntary control over behavior, but laughter like yawning shows that this isn’t true.

For example, if you ask I’ll ask you right now, will you laugh for me? Please? 

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. You know that it’s gonna be an uncomfortable artificial laugh. In fact, even the thought of just trying to do it now makes me feel uncomfortable. 

Robert Provine: Yeah. Most people, about half people will say I can’t laugh in command, and the other half will try and fail rather miserably.

Instead of giving you something like, ha. Okay. Not convincing actors, of course, are gonna be better at this. Throughout the years from the ancient philosophers to the present, there’s this notion that. Laughter we speak haha. The way we would speak a word in speech, and this is clearly not the case because for example, will you say, haha, 

Bruce Daisley: haha, 

Robert Provine: okay, that’s easy.

But if you ask someone to laugh, you’re gonna find that most can’t do it persuasively. So we go through life laughing our way through life. It’s not under conscious control. We are not the rational beings. We fancy ourselves to be. 

Bruce Daisley: So let’s so what, so why are we doing it? Is it about synchronizing ourselves with people around us?

Why would we have these involuntary reactions? 

Robert Provine: We are synchronizing ourselves with others. Whether we yawn. When you see another person yawn or laugh, when we hear another person laugh, we’re bonding with that other individual. So this is the kind of behavior that bonds us and promotes relationships.

Laughter brings us together. Again, much of the talk about. Laughing our way to health and so on, which is an iffy thing. I think. Clearly a life well lived is going to be full of laughter, but is laughter going to make us happy? Is laughter gonna make us healthy? Perhaps not. Maybe healthy people simply laugh more.

But if we ask the question, what is laughter? It suggests some important things here. Laughter is the sound of play. If we trace the evolution of laughter from our ancient primate relatives, and we can do this by studying chimpanzees and other great apes, they too laugh if you tickle a chimpanzee. They tickle each other.

They produce their version of the laugh, which I’ll provide a version of this. Seeing that humans are one of, are a really, a chimpanzee in good standing. I’m qualified to do this. Here’s a chimpanzee laugh. It’s a kind of panning sound. Okay? It sounds different than human laughter in that if you take that sound and you play it to an audience, a naive audience doesn’t know what the sound is, and ask ’em what they’re hearing.

No one volunteers their hearing laughter. They may say, I’m listening to panting, maybe a dog. I listening to people having sex. Some people say it, it sounds like sanding or sawing. Anyway, that gives us a hint. First of all other animals laugh, but they laugh with somewhat different vocalization. In those cases, it’s like pant. Pant as a chimpanzee Laughter. they make one sound per inward and outward breath. This is different. This evolved in the human laughter where we chop an outward breath. So pant became ha. So in humans, our ha sound that involves the chopping, the parsing of an outward breath, just as I’m talking to you now, chimpanzees don’t laugh that way.

They make one sound for inward and outward breath. In fact, contrasting human and chimpanzee laughter may indicate why we can talk and they can’t. They don’t have sufficient breath control to modulate an outward breath. In the contentious area of ape language, everyone agrees that you can’t teach a chimp to talk.

You can teach ’em to sign that you can’t teach them to talk. The reason is they can’t make the fancy sounds like I’m talking to you right now, is parsing an outward breath to make sounds. They can’t do it. Who would’ve guessed that breath control is the reason. The key to the reason why we can talk and other animals can’t is breath control and laughter provided the key.

Who would’ve guessed 

Bruce Daisley: And tell me though the, I think the way that you describe it in the book is that you say effectively then, whether it’s chimpanzees or whether it’s humans effectively, then the there seems to be a function served by laughing and it seems to be to some extent, showing each other that the safety there.

And you mentioned play, but you describe laughter us. As closer to an impoverished human song, like a, a bird song. Do you wanna just explain why, what you mean by that? 

Robert Provine: Yeah, LA laughter. Laughter is a species typical meaning that all members of our species do it. It’s a play vocalization it, it’s a signal that I wanna play with you.

I’m not attacking you. So in chimps, they make this, ah. Actually, dogs make a kind of panning sound like that too, when they wanna play. So the sound of laughter really started out as the sound of labored breathing during rough and tumble play, and then the sound of labored breathing became the signal for play.

And that’s the signal that chimps, for example, sent to each other. In our case, it’s one step removed. So instead of going pant the way our ancestors did, we go, ha. And that’s a symbol that I wanna play. So laughter is really the sound of play. And when you hear laughter, you have, cases where people are playing with each other, whether it’s the more physical, rough and tumble of childhood, or its adult play more often happens in the arena of conversation.

In regard to the workplace, for example, if you have people laughing in the workplace, this means that they’re in a playful mood, they’re having fun and also will indicate they’re around other people. So when you find laughter, whether it’s in the workplace or someplace else, it means play is happening and another person is present.

Bruce Daisley: Explain. So connect those two things for me. ’cause I can definitely see laughter working in a scenario of playing. But you also said that. We find ourselves laughing in work environments where nothing funny has taken place. So is it because we’re trying to reactivate that sense of playful safeness, is there a, are they different or the same?

The notion of play and the notion of safety. 

Robert Provine: They’re related, for example, some play could involve, risk and physicality and other kind of things. But the key is that when you laugh, you’re basically producing this ancient vocalization that’s play. It has to do with relationships with another person.

It’s not related to jokes. And also you don’t have voluntary control over it. For example, a lot of people will talk about, I laugh for this reason or that reason. I think basically that’s just an attempt to create an account, a kind of post hoc account for why we did something. But you’re trying to rationalize the irrational a better approach than the one that I’ve taken in my research is basically simply observe what people do.

Don’t ask them why they did it, because first of all, they don’t know and you’re not gonna get good information about that. They may say, oh, I laughed because I was nervous. I laughed to put someone else at ease, whatever. And I think, no, none of those things are really true. That’s just an attempt to try to explain what you did, because people are not willing to accept the fact that it just happened.

Suggesting that something just happened doesn’t mean that there is not a script, a kind of underlying lawfulness of it. I think that is one of the exciting things that, I learned in pursuing this is we humans in our are not like a captain of our ship guiding ourselves through the shoals, avoiding icebergs and so on.

Basically all this is happening at an unconscious level. Of course, just because it’s unconscious doesn’t mean that it’s not lawful, it’s not predictable. 

Bruce Daisley: I, once we’ve established that serving a role in a work environment where it’s signaling safety it’s to some extent sort of forging a sink, forging a connection with other people.

Is there anything that we and you’d presume that all of those things are desirable in a work environment. Is there anything we can do to. Stimulate more laughter. 

Robert Provine: Yeah, if you want more laughter, you need to be around people and you need to be in a lower pressure, playful environment. The situation that produces the most laughter actually is a male talking to a female.

The female audience laughs the most, also females talking to males. Laugh more than a male talking to a female. 

Bruce Daisley: Hang on. So there’s something in that, right? So firstly, why do females laugh more than males? And secondly, is there a power thing in the way that laughter is distributed then? 

Robert Provine: Yeah, there may be.

But as in my other work, I didn’t start off with any kind of assumption. I just observed what’s happening, for example, worldwide. And a lot of my results have been replicated in other culture almost exactly. We find is, for example, class clowns in school are almost always male. Also if you look at everyday life, you know who talks and who laughs.

The people talking that’s most reliably followed by laughter are males. So both males and females laugh more when a male than a female is talking to them. But then again, since laughter is not consciously controlled, this isn’t an issue where males decide, I’m not gonna laugh when a woman’s talking to them.

It just happens and it may very well reflect power relationships. 

Bruce Daisley: I remember reading General Schwartzkoff the the sort of the former leader of the US military, and he said that he was by any account a deeply unfunny man. He said, I’ve never said anything funny until the day I became commander in chief.

Or the commander of the US forties. And then it appeared like I was the funniest man in the world. And he re he’s related a story of how everywhere he went, if he said something that was even moderately funny, it would generate laughter from lots of people. So there, there does seem to be something doesn’t there in the fact that we tend to laugh around people who are in a more elevated status than us.

Robert Provine: Yeah. And it’s always safer to laugh with people in power than laugh at them, so if they’re making an effort of humor, everyone else is gonna help them along. Also a given person can have a very different kind of laugh life in different context, you know, for example. A person in position of power could be a prime minister, for example.

That person is going to have a very different audience reaction when they’re in that role, as opposed to talking to some of their old school mates when they were at university, for example. So you might be laughing along with your old pals, but in the position of authority, there may be a lot less laughter except laughing with, laughter is downward.

Typically. For example, a person in power can make fun. For example the unfortunate American president we have is very good at ridicule, so has no sense of irony and no sense of self-deprecation. Okay, 

Bruce Daisley: so I was gonna come onto to him because in James Comey’s book about his time being the FBI director he takes several pages to talk about Donald Trump and how he says that he worked.

Comey says he worked directly with George W. Bush. He worked directly with Obama, and he said both of them used laughter to relax a room to make people feel. At ease speaking up, they used laughter to ridicule themselves to, to level the hierarchy in a room. And Comey observes in the whole time that he was with Trump.

He never saw him laugh, but when he did laugh, it was always ridiculing people. Do you wanna just explain that then? 

Robert Provine: Yeah. Also there was a amusing incident with Trump speaking to the United Nations last year. When he was talking about he had the most successful American ad administration for the first two years in history, and the audience laughed at him.

That’s right. And I think he could relate to that. Basically he doesn’t have a category for that, yeah I’m afraid irony has died. 

Bruce Daisley: He was completely bemused by it, wasn’t he? He didn’t quite understand.

Robert Provine: Yeah. He, it, he just stopped and I forget exactly what he said, 

Bruce Daisley: but he says, you laugh.

That’s fine. That’s fine. It was something like that. He couldn’t, it was like this real dissonance in his head. He couldn’t quite take it in, could he? 

Robert Provine: No, he couldn’t. But that’s an important part of, again, the just as talking with listening to other people and laughing along with ’em is an important part of bonding.

That’s a difference between bonding and pontificating. 

Bruce Daisley: Which, which I guess explains in James Comey’s description, it explains how George W. Bush and president Obama used laughter. They used laughter as a way to relax the people around them, to, to some extent build a bit of psychological safety to the people would feel more comfortable in, in contributing.

And they seem to use laughter in a classic way. 

Robert Provine: Yeah, in my book, I talked about for example, American presidents who were particularly adept at this and actually one of the first American presidents to hold a television, press conference. And of course he did it because he was good at it and the press loved them was John F.

Kennedy. He was funny, and yet it didn’t diminish his, role as leader. It’s a delicate line. You mentioned Schwartzkoff, how many general funny generals are there? American Generals may be very funny when they’re talking about some of their old buddies back at West Point, but they’re not funny as commander, basically there you’re not looking for so much relationships as general means that basically you have general responsibilities.

There’s the weight of commands, so they’re basically telling you people what to do and they better do it. 

Bruce Daisley: Because la laughter also seems to activate creativity, or in, in what I saw was that it seems to, maybe it’s back to that sense of play, actually, maybe that’s why it’s by making people more relaxed, they seem to be more willing to.

Expose themselves and give more expansive ideas. 

Robert Provine: Yeah. I think that you’re gonna be more creative in the workplace if you see the work as an extension of play as opposed to just turning the crank. And I think for example again laughter is a a sign that play is going on in the work environment, and that’s a positive thing.

And as opposed to a lot of people who’ve seen traditionally laughter as something that, like we can laugh or a way to health. I think, which is a more tenuous proposition, and I’m certainly not arguing against laughter if you’re feeling poorly, where laughter may be beneficial. But maybe since laughter is a sign of social relationships, maybe we’ve misplaced our priorities.

Maybe if laughter does contribute to good health, it’s ’cause laughing people are engaged in playful relationships. So there’s the social component as well as the play component. Yeah. I don’t mean to be the skunk at the tea party here. I’d say laughter feels good when we do it.

Isn’t that enough? Does it have to cure cancer or make your kidney disease go away? I think. And to the extent in which it may contribute to good health, it may be simply the role of play and the role of relationships. Okay. 

Bruce Daisley: Okay. So it’s almost like it’s laughter exists in a relaxed environment and a relaxed environment might lead to better health.

The notion that you can laugh your way to good health is probably is probably a leap too far. 

Robert Provine: Yes. I believe it is. 

Bruce Daisley: Tell me this in the, it’s been, it’s been one of the things you’ve studied, but would you say that in. In the world we live in now, laughter is less frequent or certainly the reason I enter that with a vested interest.

I, I feel that people laugh less at work now than they might have done in the past. And I’m not sure if that’s me romanticizing that or, having rose into glassies looking at the past. What’s your view on it? 

Robert Provine: I believe that you’re probably right there. My guess is that serious science, I’m not talking about simply competence, but people that are really working at the frontiers of their discipline.

We’re talking about a work week that probably starts at 60 to 80 hours a week. And of course there’s some hardcore techies that say, commitment starts at a hundred hours a week. And there’s a lot of people that do that. That’s a challenging thing. Also, I find political environment, we talk about whether it’s national socialist in Germany or the Soviet regime.

Or could it even have more democratic regimes these days? Whether it be May in the UK or Trump especially, for example, Trump basically bases his power base depends upon fear and anger. And fear and anger are not conducive to laughter, except the occasional ridicule.

Bruce Daisley: We covered a lot there, right? If you’re interested in this, do check out Professor Provo’s books, laughter and Curious Behavior. They’re both worth checking out if you’ve enjoyed this. Please do give us a rating at Apple Podcasts. I never peed all that enough, but Apple Podcast is a racket where unless you unless you’re trying to get ratings all the time, you slip down the charts if you’ve enjoyed it.

So do give us a rating and recommend it to a friend. You can always connect to me on LinkedIn or you can sign up for our email and you’ll find that with all the podcast episodes at Eat, sleep, work, repeat fm. You can sign up and receive that email now. Thank you for listening. See you next time.