10 Fascinating Facts About Laughter

Professor Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist and stand-up comic, put together these surprising facts about laughter.2

1. Rats Laugh When They’re Tickled

Rats laugh when they’re tickled, and the more they play together, the more they laugh. Psychologist Jack Panksepp first observed laughing rats in the 1990s; he needed special equipment to hear it, as rats’ laughs are very high pitched.

2. You’re More Likely to Laugh Around Others – Not Because of Jokes

If you're laughing, you're far more likely to be surrounded by others, according to research by laughter expert Dr. Robert Provine. The critical laughter trigger for most people is another person, not a joke or funny movie.

After observing 1,200 people laughing in their natural environments, Dr. Provine and his team found that laughter followed jokes only about 10-20 percent of the time. Social laughter occurs 30 times more frequently than solitary laughter.

In most cases, the laughter followed a banal comment or only slightly humorous one, which signals that the person is more important than the material in triggering laughter.

3. Your Brain Can Detect Fake Laughter

Professor Scott’s research has shown that your brain can tell the difference between real or staged laughter. When you hear staged, or deliberate, laughter, it prompts more activity in your brain’s anterior medial prefrontal cortex, which helps you understand other people’s emotions.

This suggests your brain automatically goes to work deciphering why someone is deliberately laughing.

4. Laughter Is Contagious

The saying "laugh and the whole world laughs with you" is more than just an expression: laughter really is contagious. The sound of laughter triggers regions in the premotor cortical region of your brain, which is involved in moving your facial muscles to correspond with sound and prepare to join in.3

5. Jokes Are Funnier if You Know the Comedian

Familiarity is a key part of humor and laughter, and research shows people find jokes told by famous comedians to be funnier than the same joke told by someone they’re not familiar with.

6. Laughing Burns Calories

Laughing raises both your energy expenditure and heart rate by about 10 percent to 20 percent. This means you could burn about 10-40 calories by laughing for 10 to 15 minutes. While this sounds good in theory, you’d have to laugh solidly for an hour or more for this calorie burning to have any meaningful effect.

7. Laughing Is Good for Your Relationships

Research shows that couples who use laughter and smile when discussing a touchy subject feel better in the immediacy and report higher levels of satisfaction in their relationship. They also tend to stay together longer.

8. Laughter Requires Timing

Laughter has a distinctive pattern. It rarely occurs in the middle of a sentence. Instead, laughter tends to occur at the end of sentences or during a break in speech, which suggests language is given the priority. According to Dr. Provine:4

"The occurrence of speaker laughter at the end of phrases suggests that a neurologically based process governs the placement of laughter in speech.

Different brain regions are involved in the expression of cognitively oriented speech and the more emotion-laden vocalization of laughter."

Comedians also use the natural tendency for laughter to grow and fade to their advantage, and will leave spaces at the end of a sentence for the audience to fill in with laughter.

9. Laughter Is Attractive

Research by Dr. Provine found that women laugh 126 percent more than men in cross-gender conversations, with men preferring to be the one prompting the laughter.

In a review of more than 3,700 newspaper personal ads, Dr. Provine revealed that women were 62 percent more likely to mention laughter, including seeking a mate with a sense of humor, while men were more likely to offer humor in their ads.

10. Some Things Can Make Virtually Everyone Laugh

While there’s no one joke that makes everyone laugh, Professor Scott found that one of the best tools for making people laugh in her lab is a clip of people trying not to laugh in a situation where it would be highly inappropriate to do so.