Can’t Take a Joke

As reported in Science, the journal Personality and Individual Differences has recently published a series of studies on gelotophobia – the fear of being laughed at. Interestingly, the researchers have demonstrated that this is distinct from the more common neuroses around general shaming. The disease is, apparently, characterized by an inability to distinguish friendly and hostile laughter, to see no difference between teasing and ridicule, to “distrust smiling faces,” and even to use humor less than the average person does. The most significant conclusion the study suggested, however, was that gelotophobic individuals proved less able to manage their emotions, and, as a consequence, to tend towards more hostile relationships with others. 

Comedy has often been viewed as a fundamentally hostile pursuit – the great Groucho Marx himself explained that he stopped spouting one-liners at parties because it made conversation a competition: “I realized it was killing conversation… It ruins communication.” Freud, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, liked to characterize humor as a kind of psychological trojan horse, allowing conscious expression of socially unacceptable thoughts originating in that psychopathic homunculus he called the id. But this finding suggests instead that humor,  cruel as it may be (and, frankly, should be: see Family Circus for what happens when somebody ignores this basic precept) is essential to interpersonal understanding.

This can mean one of two things: that humor is not the expression of antisocial, competitive urges, and rather a way in which animals indicate readiness for friendly interaction; or, that humor is the expression of those urges, and they’re simply so widespread that to not acknowledge them means the breakdown of society. This first explanation, incidentally, is at the core of much of the evolutionary neuroscience that has looked at the roots of human laughter – most notably Panksepp and Burgdorf’s “‘Laughing rats’ and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy?” and Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, by Robert Provine. The second is more or less a logical extension of Freud’s landmark Civilization and Its Discontents. Either way, Paul Mooney remains a genius.