ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 12, 1996 TAG: 9602130044
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: COLLEGE PARK, MD.
SOURCE: DOUGLAS BIRCH THE BALTIMORE SUN
It's an ancient instinct. Dictators and schoolteachers have tried to control it, fearing its contagious power to undermine authority. When it erupts at the wrong moment, it can signal severe illness.
Still, most people can't talk about it without cracking a smile.
It's laughter. And for Professor Robert E. Provine, who has spent the past six years studying chortles, titters, brays, giggles and guffaws, it's a very serious subject.
``We spend a lot of time looking at the vocalization of other animals, such as bird sounds and animal calls,'' says Provine, 52, a psychologist at the University of Maryland. ``And yet we have almost totally neglected this `call' of the human species.''
Six years ago the scientist - a tall, bearded man with a booming Santa Claus-style laugh - set out to remedy that by studying laughter the way Jane Goodall studied the social life of chimpanzees.
He and his assistants hung around shopping malls and city streets, eavesdropping on whoops and hoots. In his classes, he subjected students to the cackles of mechanical laugh boxes to test their reactions.
He stuck microphones in people's faces and asked them to chuckle. Then he analyzed tapes of those encounters in an acoustic laboratory at the National Zoo, set up to study bird calls. He has written six scientific papers on the topic, and in January published a piece on laughter in the American Scientist magazine.
Among his conclusions:
Four times more laughter is triggered by bland phrases than by formal jokes.
People are 30 times more likely to laugh in groups than alone.
A person who is talking chuckles 46 percent more than the people listening.
Women laugh far more than men, except when they are listening to other women. Then, they generally clam up.
Laughter, he says, serves some primitive social function, not yet nailed down. And he believes there is a specialized structure in the brain, outside our conscious control, that listens for laughter and responds in kind.
While each individual's laugh may sound distinctive, Provine says acoustic studies show all laughter fits essentially the same pattern: a staccato burst of notes about a 15th of a second long, repeated about every fifth of a second.
``If you do a sonic analysis of the high-pitched titter and the deep belly laugh, you will find that they share a common structure,'' he says.
Despite folklore to the contrary, humans aren't the only animals that laugh. Chimpanzees and other apes make a laugh-like sound in response to playful social situations.
But there are key differences, says Provine, who studied chimps at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center in Atlanta. First, most ape laughter follows wrestling, tickling or chasing games, not sounds. Humans can be reduced to tears by tickling, but most of the time we laugh because of auditory cues.
Second, people laugh the way they speak: by modulating exhaled air. Other primates laugh by panting rapidly. A chimp's breathy laugh, for example, sounds like someone sawing wood.
For the past 2,000 years, he says, philosophers and essayists have pondered what makes one thing funny and not something else. This, Provine says, misses the point entirely: Most laughter has nothing to do with jokes.
In a study of 1,200 episodes of laughter, Provine found that only about one out of five were linked to a deliberate effort at humor. Most of the ``jokes'' tended to be lame, at best: ``Do you date within your species?'' someone asked. ``He didn't realize he was sitting in dog stuff until he put his hand down to get up,'' someone quipped.
The big laugh-getters? Such dull stuff as: ``You're doing what?'' and ``Where have you been?''
There are striking gender differences. Women do most of the laughing, while men get most of the laughs.
When a woman talks to a man, for example, the speaker ``is laughing up a storm,'' Provine says. The man laughs, but not a lot. When a woman is talking to another woman, the speaker laughs a lot. The listener? Hardly at all.
All of which must be tough on female comedians. And Provine isn't sure why.
``Are we dealing here with learned cultural conventions?'' he wonders. ``Are we dealing with something that has some deeper social or biological roots? Are we seeing something here that's associated in some way with patterns of dominance and submission?''
Whatever its function, laughter is a universal instinct.
People spontaneously join in when they hear someone else laughing. After World War I, the "Okeh Laugh Record," a recording of a bleating trumpet interrupted by laughter, was a best-seller. Television producers exploit this by using laugh tracks dubbed into the soundtracks of comedies.
Laughter is so infectious, it has triggered epidemics. An outbreak began in the Bukoba District of Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania) in 1962, when a group of 12- to 18-year-old schoolgirls began to giggle and weep with laughter. The giggling spread like wildfire, and eventually forced the closing of some schools. For six months, the region remained a kind of heehaw hot zone.
There is a darker side to laughter. People who have gelastic or ``laughing'' epilepsy ``might laugh at virtually any circumstances,'' without feeling any mirth. Multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease and several psychiatric ailments can produce similar symptoms.
This ``pathological laughter'' can be unnerving, and have devastating social consequences. Laughter in the wrong context can sound like jeering or ridicule.
Unbridled laughter can threaten authoritarian control, Provine points out. That's why dictatorships throughout history, including Nazi Germany, have sought to control laughter.
Sometimes, people simulate mirth to manipulate other's emotions.
Consider the sinister, theatrical laugh of the matinee bad guy. Or the scornful ``Ha!'' of the skeptic. Or what Provine calls the ``talk-laughter'' of the talk-show host: `` `Yes, I see what you mean.... Oooh, oh, oh yes! I see, heh, heh...','' he says, doing his best Regis Philbin imitation.
But these are exceptions. True laughter, he says, can be suppressed, but not manufactured. And it remains something of an enigma.
``Laughter is a universal thing, everywhere before us,'' he says. ``It's amazing that it's gotten as little attention as it has.''
LENGTH: Long : 119 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: color graphic by STEVE STINSON STAFFby CNB