LAUGH LINES

Last night I was attending an AI networking event at a bar in The City, directly below a couple of hundred high-volume TV spectators swept away by the vicissitudes of the English National Sport …wondering where the Hell it all went wrong? 

As the “OOOHs” and “AAAAGHs” pierced the reinforced concrete ceiling of our bunker, and the hearts of several participants, I couldn’t help wondering (wandering?) why England, the birthplace of The Beautiful Game, didn’t have a recognisable audience participation ritual to unite their long-suffering fans? After all, the Norwegians have their Viking Row, the Mexicans have their Wave, but what will unite the balmy army in the Azteca Stadium, four days from now, if this particular Mexican Wave looks like becoming a wave goodbye? 

Fortunately, inspiration was at hand (or phone) in the form of last week’s Nature Online Article, ‘ Ooo oo, ha ha: why humans and great apes giggle alike when tickled.’  What could be more English, I thought, than laughing in the face of adversity? So I read on:

‘Laughter is a conserved vocalisation in humans and their closest primate relatives. A study published in Communications Biology on 25 June found that their laughter followed consistent rhythmic patterns. When great apes and humans between six months and seven years old were tickled, they left evenly spaced intervals between successive laughing sounds. The authors suggest that these regular rhythms reflect how nuanced primate vocal motor control can be and that it might have been inherited from a common ancestor that lived 15 million years ago.’

At time of writing I can’t really decide what’s funnier…

…a team of Italian scientists going to work every morning for a day of tickling the tummies of assorted chimps and children, gorillas and orangutang?

…or that common ancestor, 15 million years ago, who had been rolling around on the ground in tears of laughter because some souped up sabre-toothed moggy had got its fangs snagged in a banyan tree?

As a comedy writer, my heart goes out to the latter.   Too many times I have sat, bewildered, as audiences have completely missed my funniest lines.  But to be the first of the species ever to see the funny side, while the rest of the group think you've gone bananas, just because no-one else has evolved far enough yet to get it?  That has really got to hurt.

15 million years later:  Laugh and the world laughs with you…

This recent study of our primate cousins would not have surprised the late American psychologist Robert Provine, one of the pioneering researchers of laughter, who drew direct parallels with Jane Goodall's observations of chimpanzee behaviour. To Provine, laughter was an essential form of 'social glue,' binding groups and communities together throughout their waking lives, rather than something confined to comedy shows, water-cooler jokes and cartoons, as noted in a 2022 paper.*

And it looked like I might be onto something for acing the Azteca:

'What is probably the major contribution of Provine to the study of laughter is the emphasis on its pervasive social infectiousness in everyday social interactions, and the focus on the idea that the most effective stimulus for inducing laughter is another person laughing.  Provine predicted that “the efficacy of laughter to elicit laughter suggest that humans may have a “feature detector” for laughter, a neural circuit that responds exclusively to this vocalization and triggers the motor pattern of laughter in listeners”, complaining that “contagious laughter [….] has obvious mirror-like properties, but are seldom mentioned in the literature about mirror neurons.” This issue has been tackled by neuroscientists only recently.’

That Monday morning fearing...

Imagine, if you can, The Estadio Azteca, next Monday, the 6^th of July, 7,200 feet above sea-level in the basin of Lake Texcoco, on whose islands the ancient Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan was founded.  Besieged by Cortes, bedazzled by Maradona, it is 1pm back in Blighty as 83,000 football fans look anxiously on as the Mexican national team take their starting places on the sacred turf, Raúl Jiménez leading the line. And then, one by one, the home supporters spot England’s secret weapon: fluffy red, white and blue tickling sticks as created by Sir Kenneth Arthur Dodd OBE.

The strategy soon snowballs...

While other nations' fans cheer and shriek, England chuckle and chortle, unnerving their opponents through the Quarter-finals and Semis, until, united in mirth, England's sixty-year march to the World Cup Final leads inexorably to the Old Enemy, Les Bleus. And for one night only, by kind permission of His Majesty, King Charles IIII, the National Anthem is omitted from the pre-match playlist. Killian Mbappé’s eyes narrow suspiciously. Didier Deschamps covers his mouth to confer with his assistants. Only minutes before the power and majesty of La Marseillaise has whipped the crowd up into a frenzy, and now a solitary acoustic guitar strums out from the PA system. The team join arms, Harry Kane leading the line, and a worldwide TV audience of 1.5 billion drop their jaws as one as England burst into song with: “Always look on the bright side of life,” and within seconds the entire stadium, nay, the entire planet, is whistling along with them: "dum, dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dee...”

Game over!

DT 2 July 2026

*The Naturalistic Approach to Laughter in Humans and Other Animals: Towards a Unified Theory, Elisabetta Palagi, Fausto Caruana, Frans B.M. de Waal. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B; Biological Sciences. 2022