This theorizing yields deep insights into laughter. Laughter is not simply a read-out of an internal state in the body or mind, be it the cessation of anxiety and distress or uplifting rises in mirth, levity, or exhilaration. Instead, laughter is also a rich social signal that has evolved within play interactions—tickling, roughhousing, banter—to evoke cooperative responses in others. The laughter as cooperation thesis brings together scattered findings in the empirical literature. A deadlocked negotiation between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators took a dramatic turn toward common ground and compromise after they had laughed together. In my own research with executives, laughter early in negotiations—the product of breaking-the-ice banter about families, travel mishaps, hotel rooms, golf games, and the like—sets the stage for mutually beneficial bargaining. Workplace studies find that coworkers often laugh when negotiating potential conflicts—in tight spaces, at tense team meetings, when critiquing a colleague’s work. Romantic partners who manage to laugh while discussing an issue of conflict find greater satisfaction in their intimate relations. Strangers who laugh while flirting in casual conversation report greater attraction. Friends whose laughs join in antiphonal form discover greater intimacy and closeness.
And what applies to the role of laughter in Middle East negotiations and the pyrotechnics of executives haggling, colleagues coexisting, and strangers flirting speaks to the long-term trajectories of attempts at connubial peace. John Gottman has found that for couples who were divorced on average 7.4 years after they were married, negative affect—for example, contempt and anger—was especially predictive of marital demise. For couples who divorced on average 13.9 years after they were married, it was the absence of laughter that predicted the end of their bond. In the early stages of a marriage, anger and contempt are highly toxic. In the later phases of intimate relations, it is the dearth of laughter that leads individuals to part ways. Without that cooperative frame for an intimate bond that laughter provides, as well as its attendant delights, partners move on.
Perhaps laughter is the great switch of cooperation. It is a framing device, shifting social interactions to collaborative exchanges based on trust, cooperation, and goodwill. Perhaps the pulse of a marriage is to be heard in the laughter the partners share. When I awaken and I hear my two daughters giggling in the antiphonal laughter that Bachorowski discovered, I know the morning will be fine, and relatively free of the conflicts of siblings as they seek their distinct niches in life. Perhaps our relationships are only as good as our histories of laughter together.
This theorizing, though, is in need of a bit more precision. We cooperate in many ways—through gifts, soothing touch, compliments, promises, and acts of generosity. Laughter must be associated with a more specific brand of cooperation.
Counterexamples to the laughter as cooperation hypothesis readily leap to mind. Bullies routinely laugh at their aggressive acts of humiliation (just listen to the shrill nerve jangling “ha, haa” of Nelson, the bully on The Simpsons). Some torturers at Abu Ghraib were heard to laugh at their victims. Thomas Hobbes wrote that laughter is the “sudden glory” produced by “the apprehension of some deformed thing in another” that makes people “suddenly applaud themselves”—a view that does not surprise given his portrayal of a dog-eat-dog world. Clues to a more precise conceptualization of laughter are found in its origins—in how play and laughter emerge in children, and what is being achieved, socially and conceptually, in the process.
THE ABUSE OF LANGUAGE
The acquisition of language in young children is breathtaking. Children learn ten or so words a day until the age of six, when the average child has a command of over 13,000 words. Children produce grammatically complex phrases even when not given such input from their parents, for example when parents speak pidgin. It is for these reasons that Steve Pinker called this high-wattage capacity the language instinct.
Just as remarkable, though, is how quickly children begin to abuse the rules of language. In particular, there is striking developmental regularity in the tendency for children, early in life, to violate basic rules of representation. They quickly start producing utterances that violate notions that words are supposed to refer to specific objects, and objects are to be characterized by specific words. And it is in this representational abuse that we find the core meaning of laughter—laughter indicates that alternatives to reality are possible, it is an invitation to enter into the world of pretense, it is a suspension of the demands of literal meaning and more formal social exchange. Laughter is a ticket to travel to the landscape of the human imagination.
In his analysis of the development of pretense, Alan Leslie details three kinds of pretend play in children. Each kind of pretend play hinges on the child violating the rules regarding correspondences between words and the objects to which they refer. In object substitution, the child substitutes nonliteral meanings of objects for the real meaning of the object. In the young child’s world of pretend play, rocks become bread, swim goggles become cell phones, pillows become walls to fortresses, bedrooms become classrooms, older sisters petty rock stars or demanding old dames in the grocery store they run in the living room.
Children attribute nonliteral properties to objects in a second form of pretend play. While my daughters were five and three, respectively, I spent the better part of a year being a prince dancing with them at various balls. They insisted that I wear a certain pair of sweats, which they ascribed with the velvety beauty of a prince’s medieval tights. This form of play, founded on the attribution of pretend properties, shifted a bit later to a set of identities I felt much more at home in—the ogre or friendly gorilla—all pretend identities that derived from elaborations upon my physical status and regrettable postpartum paunch.
And finally, the young child’s world becomes filled with imaginary objects. In this third kind of pretend play, children simply imagine things that are not there—chalices in the princess’s cupped hand, swords, magic carpets, evil witches and comrades in common cause.
These forms of pretense emerge in systematic fashion at around eighteen months of age. They are all systematically accompanied by laughter. And they lead the child to develop the ability to use words to refer to multiple objects. As children free themselves from one-to-one relations between words and objects, they learn that words have multiple meanings. They also learn that objects can be many things—a banana can be a banana, a phone, an ogre’s nose, or a boy’s penis (when the parents aren’t around).
In the freedom of pretend play, children learn that there are multiple perspectives upon objects, actions, and identities. The child moves out of the egocentrism of his or her own mind and learns that the beliefs and representations of other minds most certainly differ from one’s own. And it is laughter that transports children to this platform of understanding and epistemological insight.
Developmental psychologists who have studied the pretend play of siblings in the home, or the playful wrestling of parents and children, or the playful exchanges of children on the playground, find that laughter reliably initiates and frames play routines. A child or a parent will laugh as a chase game, roughhousing, round of silly wordplay or storytelling gets under way. Linguist Paul Drew carefully analyzed the unfolding of family teasing interactions and found that they are framed by laughs. Laughter is a portal to the world of pretense, play, and the imagination; it is an invitation to a nonliteral world where the truths of identities, objects, and relations are momentarily suspended, and alternatives are willingly entertained. Those hours of pretend play—peek-a-boo games, monsters and princesses, the ogre under the bridge, astronauts—are the gateway to empathy and the moral imagination.