What’s The Point of Laughter?
CrowdScience
BBC
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This violent and repetitive involuntary constriction of the chest muscles is highly infectious, and can result in convulsions, profuse tears and a reddening of the face. People are known to clutch their chests or roll around on the floor during the more intense bouts. Buy why? It seems a particularly odd thing to do and that’s why CrowdScientists, Erin from Australia, Geraldine from Switzerland, and Musweu from Zambia wanted to find out more about laughter. In pursuit of an understanding of what laughter is, and why we do it, Geoff Marsh attempts to distinguish the sounds of friends from strangers laughing together, and explores the earliest origins of this rib-rending behaviour. In the process he discovers that we’re not alone in laughing, and uncovers the importance of this ability for making and maintaining friendships.
Presenter: Geoff Marsh Producer: Rory Galloway
(Photo: Two young girls eating an ice-cream and Laughing. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:29.1 | Sounds? |
| 0:30.1 | You're unable to talk, you're unable to speak, you can't breathe, it's just |
| 0:36.5 | squeezing air out of you and you start to get red in the face, you start to become |
| 0:41.6 | sore in the throat, you can get an aching in your |
| 0:44.4 | body you become very weak and floppy it's very hard to do things with your hands |
| 0:51.0 | you can catch it you can catch it really easily from |
| 0:55.1 | somebody else so it can just spread to you without you even know why you're |
| 0:57.7 | doing it. |
| 0:59.7 | Hello and I've accidentally ended up at a laughter yoga session to |
| 1:05.0 | crowd science from the BBC World Service. I'm Jeff Marsh and I've accidentally |
| 1:11.5 | ended up at a laughter yoga session to answer this question from Erin in Australia. |
| 1:17.0 | Hi Crowd Science, my name is Erin and I'm from Australia. |
| 1:21.0 | My question for today's Crowd Science is, what is the point of laughter? |
| 1:25.0 | Great question because on the face of it it seems quite obvious. We all laugh and we all kind of |
... |
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