Pop-Con English (뉴미디어로 배우는 영어)

● 11주차: Why we laugh

( https://youtu.be/UxLRv0FEndM?list=WL )

1. Unit 5 Sophie Scott: Why we laugh

가. 5.1 TED Talk Part 1 script

Hi. I’m going to talk to you today about laughter, and I just want to start by thinking
about the first time I can ever remember noticing laughter. This is when I was a little girl.
I would’ve been about six. And I came across my parents doing something unusual, where
they were laughing. They were laughing very, very hard. They were lying on the floor
laughing. They were screaming with laughter. I did not know what they were laughing at,
but I wanted in. I wanted to be part of that, and I kind of sat around at the edge going,
“Hoo hoo!” Now, incidentally, what they were laughing at was a song which people used
to sing, which was based around signs in toilets on trains telling you what you could and
could not do in toilets on trains. And the thing you have to remember about the English
is, of course, we do have an immensely sophisticated sense of humor.
At the time, though, I didn’t understand anything of that. I just cared about the laughter,
and actually, as a neuroscientist, I’ve come to care about it again. And it is a really weird
thing to do. What I’m going to do now is just play some examples of real human beings
laughing, and I want you to think about the sound people make and how odd that can be,
and in fact how primitive laughter is as a sound. It’s much more like an animal call than
it is like speech. So here we’ve got some laughter for you. The first one is pretty joyful.
Now this next guy, I need him to breathe. There’s a point in there where I’m just, like,
you’ve got to get some air in there, mate, because he just sounds like he’s breathing out.
This hasn’t been edited; this is him.
And finally we have – this is a human female laughing. And laughter can take us to some
pretty odd places in terms of making noises. She actually says, “Oh my God, what is that?”
in French. We’re all kind of with her. I have no idea.

나. 5.2 TED Talk Part 2 script

Now, in terms of the science of laughter, there isn’t very much, but it does turn out that
pretty much everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. So it’s not at all
unusual, for example, to hear people to say humans are the only animals that laugh.
Nietzsche thought
that humans are the only animals that laugh. In fact, you find laughter throughout the
mammals. It’s been well-described and well-observed in primates, but you also see it in
rats, and wherever you find it – humans, primates, rats – you find it associated with
things like tickling. That’s the same for humans. You find it associated with play, and all
mammals play. And wherever you find it, it’s associated with interactions. So Robert
Provine, who has done a lot of work on this, has pointed out that you are 30 times more
likely to laugh if you are with somebody else than
if you’re on your own, and where you find most laughter is in social interactions like
conversation.
So if you ask human beings, “When do you laugh?” they’ll talk about comedy and they’ll
talk about humor and they’ll talk about jokes. If you look at when they laugh, they’re
laughing with their friends. And when we laugh with people, we’re hardly ever actually
laughing at jokes. You are laughing to show people that you understand them, that you
agree with them, that you’re part of the same group as them. You’re laughing to show
that you like them. You might even love them. You’re doing all that at the same time as
talking to them, and in fact the laughter is doing a lot of that emotional work for you.
Something that Robert Provine has pointed out, as you can see here, and in fact the
reason why we were laughing when we heard those funny laughs at the start, and why I
was laughing when I found my parents laughing, is that it’s an enormously behaviorally
contagious effect. You can catch laughter from somebody else, and you are more likely to
catch laughter off somebody else if you know them. So it’s still modulated by this social
context. You have to put humor to one side and think about the social meaning of
laughter because that’s where its origins lie.
Now, something I’ve got very interested in is different kinds of laughter, and we have some
neurobiological evidence about how human beings vocalize that suggests there might be
two kinds of laughs that we have. So it seems possible that the neurobiology for helpless,
involuntary laughter, like my parents lying on the floor screaming about a silly song, might
have a different basis to it than some of that more polite social laughter that you
encounter, which isn’t horrible laughter, but it’s behavior somebody is doing as part of their
communicative act to you, part of their interaction with
you; they are choosing to do this.
In our evolution, we have developed two different ways of vocalizing. Involuntary
vocalizations are part of an older system than the more voluntary vocalizations like the
speech I’m doing now. So we might imagine that laughter might actually have two
different roots.
So I’ve been looking at this in more detail. To do this, we’ve had to make recordings of
people laughing, and we’ve just had to do whatever it takes to make people laugh, and
we got those same people to produce more posed, social laughter. So imagine your friend
told a joke, and you’re laughing because you like your friend, but not really because the
joke’s all that. So I’m going to play you a couple of those. I want you to tell me if you
think this laughter is real laughter, or if you think it’s posed. So is this involuntary laughter
or more voluntary laughter?
What does that sound like to you?

Audience: Posed.

Sophie Scott: Posed? Posed. How about this one?
I’m the best.

다. 5.3 TED Talk Part 3 script

Not really. No, that was helpless laughter, and in fact, to record that, all they had to do
was record me watching one of my friends listening to something I knew she wanted to
laugh at, and I just started doing this.
What you find is that people are good at telling the difference between real and posed
laughter. They seem to be different things to us. Interestingly, you see something quite
similar with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees laugh differently if they’re being tickled than if
they’re playing with each other, and we might be seeing something like that here,
involuntary laughter, tickling laughter, being different from social laughter. They’re
acoustically very different. The real laughs are longer. They’re higher in pitch. When you
start laughing hard, you start squeezing air out from your lungs under much higher
pressures than you could ever produce voluntarily. For example, I could never pitch my
voice that high to sing. Also, you start to get these sort of contractions and weird
whistling sounds, all of which mean that real laughter is extremely easy, or feels extremely
easy to spot.
In contrast, posed laughter, we might think it sounds a bit fake. Actually, it’s not, it’s
actually an important social cue. We use it a lot, we’re choosing to laugh in a lot of
situations, and it seems to be its own thing. So, for example, you find nasality in posed
laughter, that kind of “ha ha ha ha ha” sound that you never get, you could not do, if
you were laughing involuntarily. So they do seem to be genuinely these two different sorts
of things.
I’m coming to see that actually there’s even more to laughter than it’s
an important
social emotion we should look at, because it turns out people are phenomenally nuanced in
terms of how we use laughter. There’s a really lovely set of studies coming out from
Robert Levenson’s lab in California, where he’s doing a longitudinal study with couples. He
gets married couples, men and women, into the lab, and he gives them stressful
conversations to have while he wires them up to a polygraph
so he can see them
becoming stressed. So you’ve got the two of them
in there, and he’ll say to the husband,
“Tell me something that your wife does that irritates you.” And what you see is
immediately–just run that one through your head briefly, you and your partner – you can
imagine everybody gets a bit more stressed as soon as that starts. You can see physically,
people become more stressed. What he finds is that the couples who manage that feeling
of stress with laughter, positive emotions like laughter, not only immediately become less
stressed,
they can see them physically feeling better, they’re dealing with this unpleasant
situation better together, they are also the couples that report high levels of satisfaction in
their relationship and they stay together for longer. So in fact, when you look at close
relationships, laughter is a phenomenally useful index of how people are regulating their
emotions together. We’re not just emitting it at each other to show that we like each
other, we’re making ourselves feel better together.
Everybody underestimates how often they laugh, and you’re doing something, when you
laugh with people, that’s actually letting you access a really ancient evolutionary system
that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds, and clearly to regulate
emotions, to make ourselves feel better. It’s not something specific to humans – it’s a
really ancient behavior which really helps us regulate how we feel and makes us feel
better.
In other words, when it comes to laughter, you and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals.
Thank you.