This is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Suzanne Bard.

I thought you were downstairs boxing chocolates.

Oh, they kicked me out of there. I kept pinching them to see what kind they were.

Laugh tracks and television shows like I Love Lucy have been encouraging us to chuckle since the 1950s.

But they originated even before that with old radio shows.

If you just put out a comedy program on the radio, people didn't necessarily realize it was supposed to be funny.

So they started recording them with a live audience because then people had all the cues that they would get if they were at a theatre say of an audience response.

And indeed, laughter can be highly contagious.

Sophie Scott is a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London.

She and her team wondered whether adding laughter to a joke could also make it seem funnier.

So they scoured the internet for the most groanworthy jokes they could find and enlisted the help of a professional comedian to record them.

So things like what's the best day for cooking? Friday. How does a dinosaur pay its bills using Tyrannosaurus checks, that kind of thing.

And then we got people to rate how funny they were without any laughter added.

The researchers paired the jokes with both spontaneous, involuntary

laughter and with laughter that had been produced on demand.

What do you receive when you ask a lemon to help, lemonade. They played these recordings to adults, some neurotypical and some on the autism spectrum.

The main thing that we found was that the people with autism and the

neurotyp controls were both influenced by laughter in the same way so everybody

found that the more intense the laughter the funnier that made the joke so everybody's rating the jokes as even funnier when made the joke. So everybody's rating the jokes as even

funnier when they're paired with spontaneous laughter. That is, honest

involuntary laughter cute people to perceive the jokes as funnier more than

fake forced laughter did, and that result was

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