Humour and laughter as vestiges of evolution
VIEW FULL TEXT HERE

Keywords

evolution
mind
laughter
semiotics
figurativeness

How to Cite

Viana, A. (2017). Humour and laughter as vestiges of evolution. The European Journal of Humour Research, 5(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2017.5.1.viana

Abstract

This paper argues in favour of considering humour and laughter as embodied signs of the ancient, sympathetic, figurative mode of the human mind, still working with us in dance, music, singing and literary activity. Starting from steady evolutionary provisos, both the continuity and the departing lines between nonhuman vocalisations and human laughter are considered. Along the Duchenne and non-Duchenne expression types, we analyse the developmental extension of laughter, both social and cognitive, probably under complex imitative forms through millennia until the emergence of articulated languages. Then, we try to explain the particular attachment of humour and laughter to evolutionary achievements in the symbolic domain. Thus, from a cognitive and semiotic framework, here it is argued that the old signal of play and joy might have evolved on a par with full connectivity and unbounded associations promoted by symbolic activity, clinging to new meanings and abilities, but still governed by the conjoined social work of sanction and solidarity, a pattern that humour shows all over around. As a particular reflex of ancient multimodality, laughter (with humour) seems akin to participative, mythical modes of thinking that were in full force and effect at the beginning of human societies, rooted in metaphors and figurativeness. Since both humour and laughter still find their way in the contemporary contexts of free associations, human projections and extended agentivity, they could be properly considered as the embodied, old counterpart of the imaginative dimension of symbolic activity.

https://doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2017.5.1.viana
VIEW FULL TEXT HERE

References

Altenmüller, E., Schmidt, S. & Zimmermann, E. (2013). Evolution of Emotional Communication: From Sounds in Nonhuman Mammals to Speech and Music in Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aristotle (1933-1989). ‘Metaphysics’, in Tredennick, H. (ed.), Aristotle, vols. 17-18, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0086.tlg025.perseus-eng1:1.980a

Attardo, S. (1994). Linguistic Theories of Humor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Attardo, S. (2001). Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Bachorowski, J.-A. & Owren, M. J. (2001). ‘Not all laughs are alike: Voiced but not unvoiced laughter readily elicits positive affect’. Psychological Science 12, pp. 252-257.

Balari, S. & Lorenzo, G. (2013). Computational Phenotypes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barbieri, M. (2010). ‘On the origin of language’. Biosemiotics 3, pp. 201-223.

Barfield, O. (1988 [1965]). Saving the Appearances: a Study in Idolatry. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler.

Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and Nature. London: Wildwood House.

Bateson, G. (1985 [1955]). ‘A theory of play and fantasy’, in Innis, R. E. (ed.), Semiotics, London: Hutchinson, pp. 131-144.

Berger, P. L. (2014). Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Bergson, H. (1900). Le rire: essai sur la signification du comique. Paris: Félix Alcan.

Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and Ridicule. London: Sage.

Bryant, G. A. & Aktipis, C. A. (2014). ‘The animal nature of spontaneous human laughter’. Evolution and Human Behavior 35, pp. 327-335.

Cassirer, E. (1944). An Essay on Man. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Cassirer, E. (1955). The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. I, Language. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Chafe, W. (2007). The Importance of not Being Earnest. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Corballis, M. C. (2003). From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Crivelli, C., Carrera, P. & Fernández-Dols, J.-M. (2015). ‘Are smiles a sign of happiness? Spontaneous expressions in judo winners’. Evolution and Human Behavior 36 (1), pp. 52-58, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.08.009.

Culler, J. (1988). On Puns: The Foundation of Letters. Oxford: Blackwell.

Danesi, M. (1993). Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Darwin, C. (2012 [1899]). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York: Appleton and Company. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1227/1227-h/1227-h.htm

Davies, C. (1998). Jokes and their Relation to Society. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Davila Ross, M., Owren, M. J. & Zimmermann E. (2009). ‘Reconstructing the evolution of laughter in great apes and humans’. Current Biology 19, pp. 1106-1111.

Davila Ross, M., Owren, M. J. & Zimmermann E. (2010). ‘The evolution of laughter in great apes and humans’. Communicative and Integrative Biology 3 (2), pp. 191-194.

Davila Ross, M., Goncalo, J., Osborne, J. & Bard, K. A. (2015). ‘Chimpanzees (pan troglodytes) produce the same type of “laugh faces” when they emit laughter and when they are silent’. PLoS One 10 (6), http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127337.

Deacon, T. (1992). ‘The neural circuitry underlying primate calls and human language’, in Wind, J., Chiarelli, B. & Bichakjian, B. (eds.), Language Origins: A Multidisciplinary Approach, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 121-162.

Deacon, T. (1997). The Symbolic Species. New York: W. W. Norton.

Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Donald, M. (2002). A Mind so Rare. New York: W. W. Norton.

Douglas, M. (1975a). ‘Do dogs laugh? A cross-cultural approach to body symbolism’, in Implicit Meanings, London: Routledge, pp. 83-89.

Douglas, M. (1975b). “Jokes”, in Implicit Meanings, London: Routledge, pp. 90-114.

Duchenne de Boulogne, G.-B. (1990 [1862]). The Mechanisms of Human Facial Expression. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1996). Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dunbar, R. I. M. (2004). The Human Story. London: Faber & Faber.

Dunbar, R. I. M. (2013). ‘Bridging the bonding gap: the transition from primates to humans’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 367, pp. 1837-1846.

Dunbar, R. I. M. (2016). ‘Group size, vocal grooming and the origins of language’. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1122-6.

Dunbar, R. I. M. & Barrett, L. (2007). The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Eaves, D. L., Behmer Jr., L. P. & Vogt, S. (2016). ‘EEG and behavioural correlates of different forms of motor imagery during action observation in rhythmical actions’. Brain and Cognition 106, pp. 90-103.

Edelman, G. M. (2005). Wider than the Sky: View of Consciousness. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Finset, A. (2014). ‘Talk-in-interaction and neuropsychological processes’. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 55 (3), pp. 212-218.

Fitch, W. T. (2010). The Evolution of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Freud, S. (1960 [1905]). Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: W. W. Norton.

Fry, W. F. (1963). Sweet Madness: A Study of Humor. Palo Alto: Pacific Books.

Gervais, M. & Wilson, D. S. (2005). ‘The evolution and functions of laughter and humour: a synthetic approach’. Quarterly Review of Biology 80, pp. 395-430.

Gunnery, S. D., Hall, J. A. & Ruben, Mollie A. (2013): ‘The deliberate Duchenne smile: individual differences in expressive control’. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 37 (1), pp. 29-41.

Guthrie, S. (1993). Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gutwirth, M. (1993). Laughing Matter: an Essay on the Comic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Heine, B. & Kuteva, T. (2007). The Genesis of Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Holmes, J. & Stubbe, M. (2014). Power and Politeness in the Workplace. London: Routledge.

Hurley, M. H., Dennett, D. C. & Adams, R. B. Jr. (2011). Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Kant, I. (1914 [1790]). Critique of Judgment. London: Macmillan. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kant-the-critique-of-judgement.

Koestler, A. (1964). The Act of Creation. New York: Macmillan.

Kuipers, G. (2015). Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Larson, R. K., Déprez, V & Yamakido, H. (2010). The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Leach, E. R. (1976). Culture and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lutz, T. (1999). Crying. New York: W. W. Norton.

Manson, J. H., Bryant, G. A., Gervais, M. M. & Kline, M. A. (2013). ‘Convergence of speech rate in conversation predicts cooperation’. Evolution and Human Behavior 34, pp. 419-426.

Martin, R. A. (2007). The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach. Burlington: Elsevier.

Milner, G. B. (1972). ‘Homo ridens: towards a semiotic theory of humour and laughter’. Semiotica 5, pp. 1-130.

Mithen, S. R. (1996). The Prehistory of the Mind. London: Thams and Hudson.

Mithen, S. R. (2005). The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Montagu, A. (1981). Growing Young. New York: McGraw Hill.

Nash, W. (1985). The Language of Humour. London: Longman.

Norrick, N. R. (1993). Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Priego-Valverde, B. (2003). L’humour dans la conversation familière: description et analyse linguistiques. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Provine, R. (2000). Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. New York: Viking.

Provine, R. (2016). ‘Laughter as an approach to vocal evolution. The bipedal theory’. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1089-3.

Ramachandran, V. S. (1998). ‘The neurology and evolution of humour, laughter and smiling: the false alarm theory’. Medical Hypothesis 51, pp. 351-354.

Schilhab, T., Stjernfelt, F. & Deacon, T. (2012). The Symbolic Species Evolved. New York: Springer.

Scott, S., Lavan, N., Chen, S. & McGettigan C. (2014). ‘The social life of laughter’. Trends in Cognitive Science 18 (12), pp. 618-620.

Scott-Phillips, T. (2014). Speaking Our Minds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

States, B. O. (1993). Dreaming and Storytelling. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Tomasello, M. (2014). A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Trim, R. (2007). Metaphor Networks: The Comparative Evolution of Figurative Language. New York: Macmillan.

Turner, M. (1997): The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Turner, M. (2006): The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Viana, A. (2006). ‘Flipping situations and ending plots’. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 27, http://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/circulo/no27/viana.pdf.

Viana, A. (2015). Tempesta de signes. Lleida: Universitat de Lleida.

Weisfeld, G. E. (1993). ‘The adaptive value of humour and laughter’. Ethnology and Social Biology 14, pp. 141-169.

Wild, B., Rodden, F. A., Grodd, W. & Ruch, W. (2003). ‘Neural correlates of laughter and humour’. Brain 126, pp. 2121-2138.

Wildgen, W. (2004). The Evolution of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Zlatev, J. (2012). ‘Cognitive semiotics: an emerging field for the transdisciplinary study of meaning’. The Public Journal of Semiotics IV (1), pp. 2-24.

All authors agree to an Attribution Non-Commercial Non Derivative Creative Commons License on their work.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.