Narendra Raghunath: Fwd: From the Desk of Bob Mankoff

Dear Laughter Lovers,

One of the first joke books, dating from fourth century B.C., was the Philogelos—which means "laughter lover" in Greek. It has 265 jokes that I'm sure killed back then, but most now are either lethally lame or incomprehensible. Examples:

No. 53. An intellectual was eating dinner with his father. On the table was a large lettuce with many succulent shoots. The intellectual suggested: "Father, you eat the children; I'll take mother."

No. 64. An intellectual bought a pair of pants. But he could hardly put them on because they were too tight. So he got rid of the hair around his legs.

The jokes in the Philogelos have eggheads, incompetents, fools, gluttons, jokesters, drunks, misogynists, and people with bad breath, but, surprise, no animals. Not one. No quipping New Yorker cartoon dogs, or cutesy cats. And the vast potential of LOLcats remained untapped for millennia. (My daughter, Sarah, recently tapped our cat Buddy for this one.)

Why no animals? I'm blaming it on Aristotle, who in his Poetics said, "Only man between animals can laugh." Later, in his Grammatics, he changed the "between" to "among," and everyone pretty much agreed with him after that.

A couple of millennia later, but still way before LOLcats, the essayist William Hazlitt essayed that "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be."

Perhaps Hazlitt would have changed his mind if he knew about hyenas. They "laugh," having a vocalization that sounds a lot like Phyllis Diller. (See this video for a comparison.)

However, Hazlitt was right when it comes to hyenas, because scientists tell us that their "laughter" is actually a sign of frustration. Over what, we don't know, but I'm betting it's over the glacial pace of health-care reform.

Knowing that hyenas don't actually laugh hasn't stopped cartoonists from acting as though they do:

But not to worry, what science taketh away, science giveth back, because research shows that while hyenas don't laugh, chimps and rats do—but not at the one-liners they get off in New Yorker cartoons:

It's easy to believe that chimps have a rudimentary sense of humor. Just look at this sequence of photos of a daddy chimp and his son playing peek-a-boo. The adorable expression on the son is called "the play face" and often accompanies laughter.

And the neuroscientist Dr. Jaak Panskepp tickled rats until they laughed. Gee, I wish I knew it was this simple back in 1972 when I was a graduate student in psychology and conducted experiments with rats.

Clearly, their sense of humor wasn't as evolved as mine. But, just as clearly, all the evidence indicates that laughter and humor have evolved.

But what for? To create and enjoy animal cartoons? Probably not, but you might think so looking at The New Yorker, where there is rarely an issue that doesn't contain at least one—and one issue, August 29th, 1959, which contained nothing but.

Cheers,