Quinton Jackson and Larry Merchant Illuminate the Science of Laughter

"They made a Tito (Ortiz) bobblehead but that (thing) wouldn’t bobble, it would just fall down to one side and stay there."

-Quinton Jackson, ever the funnyman, on the potential physics of a Tito Ortiz bobblehead. It's a nice break from the gloomy topic of the Floyd Mayweather debacle. Or what was a debacle until Larry Merchant broke the ice, and made us wonder if a man born in the same year as the Empire State Building would do battle with one of the best boxers of the modern era. Depending on the amount of foreign substances in your system, this was probably hilarious. Or perhaps its level of hilarity depended on the amount of people you were with (?). 

In the scientific quest to understand why we laugh, you're bound to see that stat: that you're 30 times more likely to laugh in the company of others then when you're alone. What explains this pattern? Does laughter encourage us to be the social animals we've become? What about evolution has equipped us with the unique ability to scream "ha ha ha" as Larry Merchant's gray hair bounces around with confronting menace towards one of the most talented but volatile athletes in all of sports?

Was the situation funny because of Larry's clear loss of professionalism? Or more perversely, was it funny because of the potential roles of Mayweather as a Pedro Martinez stand in to Larry's Don Zimmer? Such a situation would have been far more grim, but some theories of humor hinge on how laughter highlights incongruity, and by consequence, perversity. 

What kind of advantages does laughter confer? As David Sloan Wilson in Evolution For Everyone articulates, laughter confers social benefits. When you think about its elements, how contagious it is, its elevation of mood, and just mere ability to reach others (just by virtue of sound: though it should be noted that even congenitally deaf and blind babies are capable of laughing), there is something to be said for its social impact. Even from a physiological standpoint, the actual act of laughing is enabled with something our ancestors bestowed upon us: bipedality. Unlike quadrupeds, humans possess unlinked breathing which paved the way for vocalization and speech, as Professor Robert Bovine notes in last month's Focus.

But more than acting as a social lubricant, there's also a link between laughter and pain. An article in Scientific American notes a recent laughter study from Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist out of Oxford on how laughter releases pain relieving chemicals called endorphins:

Across all tests, the participants' ability to tolerate pain jumped after laughing. On average, watching about 15 minutes of comedy in a group increased pain threshold by 10 percent. Participants tested alone showed slightly smaller increases in their pain threshold.

"When laughter is elicited, pain thresholds are significantly increased, whereas when subjects watched something that does not naturally elicit laughter, pain thresholds do not change (and are often lower)," the authors write in the paper. "These results can best be explained by the action of endorphins released by laughter."

The researchers believe that the long series of exhalations that accompany true laughter cause physical exhaustion of the abdominal muscles and, in turn, trigger endorphin release. (Endorphin release is usually caused by physical activity, like exercise, or touch, like massage.)

Perhaps you're asking yourself "who cares about the science of laughter?" Many of us would rather hear a good joke than understand what makes one: a philosophy more or less argued in Patton Oswalt's clever deconstruction of George Lucas' fundamental mistake on the prequels (besides being wretched with dialogue) in Werewolves and Lollipops, and why a time machine would be useful to snuff Mr. Lucas out.

What business do scientists have bringing their MRI's and EKG's into the Comedy Club? Well, if scientists find a humor neuron, and subsequently create a drug to stimulate it, we'd be wise to prescribe it to people people like Floyd Mayweather who could definitely benefit from watching, say, In The Loop.