Things that Yoram knows: Does only Adam have a sense of humor?

PS asks "Do only humans have a sense of humor and why?"

Yes, man is the only creature that tells jokes and laughs at them. The ancestor of laughter is found by zoologists in friendly gestures that combine mouth opening and sounds reminiscent of human laughter in monkeys in social play, but only humans create humor. Humor is an enigma that insists on laughing in the face of scientists who seek to catalog or place it in the overall story of the evolution of human intelligence.

The role of humor in courtship

Often what makes us laugh is a sudden need to reject previous assumptions and use a new template to reorganize the facts - for example, in the cartoon attached to this column, the fortune teller's last sentence requires a different understanding of the first and the context. When you check with an MRI machine how the brain works when you hear a joke or look at a cartoon, it turns out that apart from the areas of the brain that process language (in written jokes) or spatial information (in cartoons), we also activate the cerebral cortex in the bridge area between its 2 halves. This is an evolutionarily young part of the nervous system and is activated when there is a need to detect errors or handle information that does not match expectations. This is the part of the brain that we abuse when we ask people to indicate the color of the letters and show them the word "red" in green letters or when we ask them to count items on a screen and project the number 4 on them 3 times. "Award" for the success in reorganizing the information.

There are those for whom humor is a hitchhiker, when the brain grew and with it the intellectual abilities we also began to enjoy the ability to play with language and the perception of space. But the universality of humor and the high esteem for it in every society point to a mechanism that has a role.

Tests of the ability to create humor show that those who manage to combine a witty sentence with a drawing are often an intelligent person and that creativity is the component of intelligence most clearly related to humor. It is easy to understand how natural selection encouraged the development of human creativity: stone tools that indicate a burst of technical creativity appear as early as 2-3 million years ago and archeology shows the great value of creativity for the survival and success of Homo sapiens. But it is very difficult to understand how the ability to tell a successful joke will help hunt a mammoth or find a cave for the winter. About 60,000 years ago, a new type of creativity appears that apparently has no survival value: art. It is speculated that the impetus for this new type of creation is sexual selection. According to this opinion, the role of visual, literary and humorous art is to advertise the intellectual-creative ability to attract mates. Just as courtship in some species of birds is accompanied by aeronautical maneuvers to demonstrate strength and agility, i.e. proper genetics for females, so man also needs a demonstrator of ability to show his creativity to the world. It's hard to make a good joke and it's hard even to tell a joke you've already heard correctly: if you managed to make it laugh, you probably have successful genes to pass on to the next generation.

Handsome, sympathetic and has a sense of humor

A central feature of the traits that sexual selection cultivates is that they require a flamboyant display on the part of the male and selectivity on the part of the female that will bear the price of careless choice. A sense of humor is an important feature in the list of requirements that both men and women place on a partner, but it turns out that there is still a difference. Generally, women are looking for a man who can make them laugh and men are looking for a woman who will laugh at their jokes. Observations and studies have revealed that indeed men take more trouble to produce humor and women are more enthusiastic and picky consumers of humor. Already from early childhood, girls laugh more than boys, show more interest in comedies and are also quicker to reject unsuccessful jokes. Brain scans show that women activate the "analytical" left half of the brain more when they are shown a cartoon, which means they invest more in evaluating the level of humor and the reward centers are activated more, which suggests that women also enjoy a successful joke more. What further strengthens the theory of laughter as a means of courtship is that women show a strong preference for those with a sense of humor during the fertile days of the menstrual cycle when the partner's genetics are especially important.

Men with a sense of humor are seen not only as more intelligent but also as better potential fathers, as sensitive, interesting and even more masculine and taller than those who cannot laugh. . Surveys revealed that about 60% of the respondents (both men and women) think that men are funnier and only 4% evaluate women as funny. Both women and men tend to attribute jokes and cartoons that made them laugh to a male creator and those that left them indifferent to a woman (when the creator's identity is hidden). Studies on the ability to create humor based on adding a humorous sentence to a cartoon show a slight but statistically significant advantage for men. Such studies have produced similar results over forty years and in different cultures, which strengthens the hypothesis that this is indeed a real difference and not a research bias.

The studies on the ability to create humor do show a male advantage but they have some limitations. Most of the subjects on whom the statistics are based are young people in the first half of their 20s simply because students are the most available "lab rats" for social science researchers. In other words, the bulk of the information is gathered among the age group in which the preoccupation with courtship and choosing a spouse is at its peak. There are almost no studies on the ability to create humor among adults in third world countries or among the poor. In addition, the type of humor examined: jokes and cartoons does not represent the variety of ways in which humor appears in everyday life. Humor is also an important element in communication between members of the same sex, although there is a distinct difference between the sexes in the type of humor. Men are much more inclined to stop and tell a joke separately from the spontaneous dialogue and women prefer to integrate comic anecdotes from everyday life into the flow of the conversation.

But there are those who challenge the idea that the joke is a means of courtship. Are women attracted to a man because of a successful joke or is the conversation from the joke funnier from the mouth of an attractive man? A study examining humor appreciation found that rolling female laughter is a sign of attraction rather than what creates it. That sentence was funnier from the mouth of a beautiful man. The role of humor in human courtship, according to the opponents of the sexual selection theory, is not to impress but to signal interest without risking an explicit proposal that may lead to an explicit refusal.

Those who seek justifications for the human capacity for humor find many other purposes: "internal" humor based on associations or shared memories captures the group and distinguishes it from outsiders who do not understand laughter. Aggressive humor - ridicule is used against those who threaten the group or as a weapon in the struggle for a place in the hierarchy. And humor is also an excellent glue to keep people together and reduce aggression. Even if a joke is a display of creative virtuosity, such advertising is important not only for finding a partner but also for creating and maintaining friendships and partnerships that were important for survival.

In one of Asimov's science fiction stories, a scientist discovers that the jokes are part of an experiment conducted by extraterrestrials on humans, and as soon as the secret is revealed, the experiment is interrupted, and not a single joke is funny anymore. A joke that is explained will never be funny and maybe it's good that science can't really explain the joke.   

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