David Pinsof writes in his new paper (and Substack column):
* Human social life is filled with coordination problems: passing each other in a hallway, taking turns talking and listening, differentiating the meanings of “hook up with” and “meet up with,” gathering at the same time and place, etc. But what happens when we suffer a mix-up—for instance, we get stuck dancing back and forth in the hallway, or I casually mention that I “hooked up” with your mother last night? Here, I argue that such mix-ups posed a significant adaptive problem for our ancestors, disrupting cooperation, damaging reputations, fomenting needless conflict, and destroying valuable relationships. Natural selection favored three solutions to this adaptive problem: 1) a sense of humor (i.e., the ability to detect, anticipate, and avoid mix-ups), 2) mutual laughter in response to humor (which creates common knowledge of the mix-up and defuses its costs), and 3) joking as a hard-to-fake signal of one’s ability to detect and avoid mix-ups (and thus one’s value as a coordination partner).
* Many animals have play signals that they use to differentiate play interactions from real interactions. Cetaceans use an open-mouth display (Maglieri et al., 2024), kea parrots use a warble (Schwing et al., 2017), canids use a bow (Bekoff, 1995), and rats use 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations (Kisko et al., 2015). More relevant to our purposes, chimpanzees use a panting sound, uncannily reminiscent of human laughter, during bouts of tickling, chasing, or rough-and-tumble play (Matsusaka, 2004). If we could translate this panting sound into words, it might be something like: “I understand that this is play aggression and not real aggression. I am not mad at you or afraid of you.”
* We can think of the costliness, confusability, and mutual recognition of a mix-up as inputs into an emotional system: mirth or amusement—a system that likely overlaps with neural systems for play (Panksepp et al., 1984). The outputs of mirth might include: 1) an urge to laugh, 2) a heightened sensitivity to others’ laughter, 3) a motivation to reciprocate others’ laughter to the degree that it is sensed, matching the observed intensity, 4) feelings of reward in proportion to the magnitude of the costs defused by the reciprocally emerging laughter, as well as in proportion to the updated value of the coordination partnership, and 5) a deactivation of emotions that process costs, to ensure that the (potential) costs are not incurred or represented by either party, and that the process of common knowledge generation is not disrupted.
* Represented costs spread through the brain like wildfire (Sznycer & Lukaszewski, 2019; Sznycer, 2022), making their mutual defusal a difficult adaptive problem. It is often unclear what all the relevant costs to any mix-up might be (e.g., relational, reputational, physical, hygienic, economic), or all the relevant emotions the costs might feed into. A perceived insult could trigger anger, shame, guilt, sadness, regret, disgust, and fear in either the insulted party, the victim, or third parties, depending on the nature of the insult and its social context—and on what actions or events might be expected to follow from it. Insofar as mirth is well-designed, it might produce a general deactivation of emotions that process costs, in order to stop the wildfire of negative representations from spreading throughout the brain and disrupting the process of mutual cost defusal.
* Mirth can transform a person into something rather frightening. It may deactivate their fear, making them impossible to threaten or deter. It may deactivate their empathy for others’ plights, transforming others’ suffering into a joke. Scowls of disapproval would be all but invisible. Threats of punishment and cries for help would fall on deaf ears. It is nearly impossible to get through to a mirthful individual or negotiate with them for better treatment. The only thing they can do is laugh in our faces.
This might explain why mirth can, if one is not sharing it, feel hostile, creepy, or even terrifying. The best example of the menacing nature of mirth comes from the character of the Joker in The Dark Knight, whose mirthful disposition conveys a sense of fearlessness and heartlessness: he cannot be bought, reasoned with, or negotiated with because he takes nothing seriously. He just wants to watch the world burn, unsaddened by—or perversely delighted by—the sight of a world in flames.
* We can think of the phenomenology of seriousness as the opposite of mirthfulness—a state in which social or physical costs, either potential or actual, are being carefully attended to. If I’m angry with you, then you need to process the costs that I’m threatening to inflict on you (Sell et al., 2017). If something terrible has happened, we need to take that seriously and figure out what to do about it. To take something seriously is to devote non-mirthful attention to it—to be sensitive to its actual or potential costs.
But then what is a ‘serious person?’ It is a person who demands non-mirthful attention—a person who can inflict costs on others, either directly, through reputational or physical attacks, or indirectly, by withholding valuable knowledge or resources. A serious person is someone whose interests must be respected, whose threats must be heeded, whose absence is greatly felt. In the show Succession, Logan Roy tells his children they are not serious people. We can now see why his words cut so deep.
And we can also see why humor is so often political. To laugh at something is to not take it seriously—to turn off our fear in the face of a threat, our anger in the face of a provocation, or our empathy in the face of a suffering victim. Politics revolves around what we ought to take seriously as a society—what problems we must work together to solve—and mirth turns these problems into jokes. Authority is maintained by stern threats of punishment and disapproval, and mirth deflates it like a whoopie cushion. Politicians wield negative emotions as political weapons, and mirth leaves them weaponless. It is therefore unsurprising that people with stronger moral identities are less able to appreciate humor and generate jokes (Yam et al., 2019).
