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Title: Laughter: A Scientific Investigation
ISBN: 0141002255
Author:
Robert R. Provine
Publicate Date: 2001-12-01
Publish: 2001-12-01
List Price: $15.00
Average Customer Rating: 3.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $4.98
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $4.50
Amazon Merchant Price: $10.20
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Scientific Review
It's a REALLY informative book; if you're doin' a paper or someth'n, but if you're try'n to learn to be funny, like I am, it's not really helpful - interesting, but not what I was looking for.
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2: Worth a look, but.... 3.7 stars
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_Laughter: a Scientific Investigation_ is just that. Too professorial for easy reading, but some cool, unobvious stuff. For instance, speakers laugh more than their audiences (doh), and women laugh at men more than men laugh at women. Well, maybe not so unobvious after all
Anyway, here's his Laugh Matrix, where S = speaker and A = audience
... ........ Number of ..... ...... % Laughing
... ........ Episodes ....... Speaker ... Audience
---------------------------------------
S(male) A(male) ...... 275 ... 76% ...60%
S(fem) A(fem) ... ... 502 ..... ..86 .. .. .. 50
S(m)A(f) ... .. ......238 .... ...66 .. .... 71
S(f)A(m) ... .. ......185 .... ... 80 .. ....55
Hmm, be darned if I can get this to format right in Ammie's primitive word-processor. Sorry!
He also suckered some poor grad student and his (Provine's) wife(!) into analyzing 60 opera scores to see how the composers scored laughter. The sensible ones simply insert "laugh" into the score. Or, in the case of I Pagliacci, Leoncavallo instructs the singer to "laugh bitterly". In Italian, ie "Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!"
He notes that "at study's end, we faced a sober reckoning. We learned a lot more about opera than about laughter..."
Oh, and laugh tracks really do work. He watched some sexy tickling videos, too.
I was skimming towards the end, when the book came due, and didn't feel compelled to renew it. Great cover, though.
Happy reading--
Pete Tillman
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3: Interesting Insights into Studying and Exploring Laughter
A purely simple behaviour at a glimpse, laughter has largely been under-studied. Provine discusses how he learned how to study laughter, and provides simple facts about laughter that have gone largely unnoticed. Furthermore, he tackles the evolutionary links between bipedalism, speech and language through his studies on laughter. He takes a fascinating look into how laughter can serve as a powerful probe into social behaviours. Reading laughter will give you a whole new view of this instinctive behaviour, and it will begin to shed light on the psychological and biological importance of this ancient remnant. Laughter is an exceptionally entertaining book! It is not a complex read, but a must-read for the inquisitive-minded individual.
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4: Disappointing
IMHO, this doesn't yield any valuable conceptual insights into humor. If you're interested in the cognitive patterns behind jokes, comedy etc. you might want to check out Arthur Koestler's "Act of Creation" instead. He sets out to discover common patterns behind creative acts in humor, art and science and comes up with very broad original insights that I found very enlightening. Another interesting (and more formalized) attempt to conceptualize creative thinking (including humor) is being developed by some cognitive linguists (Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner). Their concepts seem to go along very well with Koestler's findings. You might want to check out their book "The Way We Think".
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5: Laughter is caused by a stuttering brain
Yes, yes, I know. Provine studied thousands of people but, what he failed to grasp is that laughter is the result of a "stuttering" brain. A person is confronted with anxiety and, the brain "stutters" and releases the vocalizations we call laughter. This brings the brain (rather mind) back into equilibrium and "solves" the dilemma . . .the anxiety.
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