NY Times Investigates Laughter, Pseudoscience Ensues

To all you grad students out there, here's the burning question (as postulated in Matt Groening's immortal School is Hell): "Will Your Research Make the World a Better Place?" For some like cancer researchers and geneticists, that's a definite yes. For others, at least you can hope for a mention in the New York Times and revel in generating discussion for discussion's sake.

Check out yesterday's What's So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing. The piece kicks off with a joke about muffins and then launches into tangents on the social status and gender gaps of laughter.

Among the findings in the article:

"When you’re low in the status hierarchy, you need all the allies you can find, so apparently you’re primed to chuckle at anything even if it doesn’t do you any immediate good."

(Translation: "That's a good one, boss" can be re-created in lab conditions)

More fake science after the jump.

"'Laughter seems to be an automatic response to your situation rather than a conscious strategy,' says Tyler F. Stillman, who did the experiments along with Roy Baumeister and Nathan DeWall."

(Or, "Sucking up is an involuntary response, along with guffawing at a ball to the crotch")

For more entertainment value however, head on over to the message boards for painfully earnest armchair theories about human patterns between the sexes. Example:

"As for women, I think laughter has a different function. Since women are inherently less funny (because they don’t have to be) they laugh as a way to maintain harmony in their tight-knit groups, even if nothing particularly funny was ever said.

"A 'Mad TV' skit from a few weeks ago illustrates this. Two women at work notice that they have the same coffee mug when one says, 'We’re coffee twins!' the two of them laugh all day about this inherently unfunny comment. When one of them gets home and is still laughing, her husband asks what’s so funny. She tells him about the 'Coffee Twins' comment and when he says it wasn’t funny at all, she screams at him.

Now, obviously there are some very funny women out there. But they are like the Sumatran ground cuckoo."

Ooh, snap!