This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson.

This episode is all about laughter. Why we laugh, how we laugh, what laughing tells the people around us, and how you can tell a real laugh from a fake one.

This is another of our special live episodes from our Being Human event series.

Our speaker is Greg Bryant.

He's an associate professor of communications at UCLA.

He studies the evolution of communication and vocal behavior.

He's most interested in the spontaneous

sounds we make, like screams, cries, and especially laughter. Here's Greg Bryant, recorded live

on stage at Public Works in San Francisco. All right, so I'm going to talk today about laughter,

and I got into studying laughter originally as a grad student.

I did my dissertation actually on what kinds of vocal signals people use to communicate

when they're being sarcastic.

And that started my, I would say, an arguably absurd academic career.

And I discovered a lot of things about how people speak when they're being ironic,

but one thing I noticed was that people laugh a lot.

And then later in my career, I really took off with it.

Now I've got more projects than I can count on laughter.

And so I'm going to describe a few of them.

But I'm very interested in cross-cultural research,

and I'm very interested in how evolutionary theory allows us to understand human vocalizations,

which goes beyond a lot of the ways that traditional psychologists and linguists often think about vocal communication.

I think that we're animals.

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