Mick Hartley

Here’s another of those vaguely unsatisfactory articles about psychologists and their latest dramatic discoveries:

Laughter, a topic that has stymied philosophers for 2,000 years, is finally yielding to science. Researchers have scanned brains and tickled babies, chimpanzees and rats. They’ve traced the evolution of laughter back to what looks like the primal joke.

If you think you’d like to read the rest of the article to find out what exciting breakthrough they’re talking about – don’t bother. Like so many articles nowadays with the by-line, psychologists have discovered that…, it’s all hot air. What they’ve discovered – or rather, the results that came out of their contrived little experiments – is that laughter acts as a social lubricant, and that generally speaking the more people see themselves as inferiors in a social setting, the more they’ll laugh. To which the reply has to be – well, who knew? If this is unlocking the secret of laughter then discovering that women in shorter skirts attract more glances from men would be to unlock the secret of sex.

As it happens I have my own theory about laughter. Being an astute observer of the human condition I’ve noticed that people tend to laugh more when they’re drunk. Why might that be? I’ve given this some thought, and here are my tentative conclusions…

Consider – alcohol is common to nearly all societies. It clearly serves an important function, perhaps in terms of the necessity for altered states of consciousness as a way of increasing overall cognitive flexibility. If you’re only familiar with one form of consciousness – sober as a judge – your thinking tends to run along familiar and unoriginal lines. Clearly there’s an adaptive advantage to those societies where minds can work from different perspectives, ie drunk or sober. [As evidence for this I might cite the rather poor showing recently in innovative terms of alcohol-free Muslim societies, but perhaps that’s a little too controversial.]

So, given the advantages of drinking – and note here that my theory as to why drinking is important is not significant: the point is that the advantages are there, whatever the reason – it follows that drinking should, psychologically, be encouraged. It should also be a social activity, given that our cognitive faculties are more readily challenged in the company of others, in the cut and thrust of conversation and debate, rather than in solitary contemplation. We evolved, remember, prior to the introduction of books, television or the internet.

So what’s the solution? In a word, laughter. Laughter is our reward for drinking. It is that mechanism whereby the act of drinking is consolidated and reinforced as a social bonding. It is, if I may borrow some Nietzschean terminology here (and try spelling Nietzschean when you’re drunk), a mechanism for ensuring that the Dionysian forces of creativity, intuition, artistic achievement, can survive against the Apollonian call to reason and order – a balance necessary for the very survival of our species.

Well, that’s the theory. All I need now is the money from some forward-thinking institution so I can subject it to those long hours of rigorous testing in the field….or, indeed, the pub.