The importance of not being earnest: the feeling behind laughter and humor

Abstract

The book contains a preface and an introduction, and then the rest is divided into three sections: Part 1, 'How we laugh', Part 2, 'Why we laugh', and Part 3, 'Pulling things together'. The volume closes with references and a combined index of both names and subjects. In his introduction, C relates laughter to a feeling of nonseriousness often elicited by a percep- tion of pseudo-plausibility in a state of affairs, which we ultimately exclude from our (serious) vision of how things are. Pseudo-plausibility has been called 'local logic', 'sense in nonsense', or 'appropriate inappropriateness' by other writers on humor. In Part 1, C concerns himself with the articulatory and acoustic phonetics of laughter, with special sections on varieties of laughter and laughing while speaking. His findings are based on recordings from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. Audio samples of the data analyzed are available at C's website. By contrast, with questionable claims by Provine (2000) about the sounds of laughter, C demonstrates, in consonance with Bachorowski, Smoski, and Owren (2001), that the vowels of laughter are within the mid-central range, or very close to schwa. C finds no phonetic basis for the folk tradition of distinguishing laughs like heehee, haha, hoho and the like, and similar transcriptions of laughter, especially those following Jefferson 1985 and others in the conversational analysis tradition. By contrast with past writers, C demonstrates the phonetic complexity and individual character of laughter along with the significance of the final inhalation to replenish air in the lungs. His description of laughing while speaking breaks new ground in focusing on specific features of laughter like tremolo and creaky voice. Still, it seems odd that C spends so much time on the phonetics of laughter in such a relatively brief book, given that his purpose is to investigate the feeling behind laughter and humor. It would have served his theoretical purpose simply to have shown that laughter is physically disabling and that laughter prevents us from acting in serious ways—just as the psychological state of nonseriousness prevents us from thinking in serious ways. The rest of the discussion simply serves to fill in the picture of how human laughter works, sounds, and interacts with speech. C further relates laughter to smiling, and discusses internal changes in the body during laughter, interaction with the brain, and the often-claimed positive effect of laughter on health. The second part of the book focuses on the feeling behind laughter and humor. C discusses emotions and their description, and the evolution of the feeling of nonseriousness in a Darwinian vein, just as one might speculate why humans developed a behavior like crying or why cats developed purring. Then there is a long consideration of nonseriousness without humor. On the one hand, laughter is not the only possible reaction to the feeling of nonseriousness; on the other