Sorry old Bean, the apes got there first by Roger Dobson
THE old ones really are the best. Evolutionary biologists have traced the origins of laughter back 4m years to pre-humans slipping and stumbling in their first faltering attempts to walk on two legs.
According to the theory, when they saw a member of their group lose his footing they would laugh as a sign to each other that something was amiss, but nothing too serious.
The theory could explain why, to this day, the ungainly walk remains a staple element of slapstick humour from John Cleese’s “Ministry of Silly Walks” to Rowan Atkinson’s accident-prone Mr Bean.
“Becoming bipedal means there was a greater chance of tripping and falling. Essentially, the suggestion is that slapstick and humour evolved from that time,” said Matthew Gervais, an American evolutionary biologist who led the study.
“When we laugh at slapstick, we are laughing at the same things that amused our early ancestors. That’s why we find them funny.”
According to the study, the next basic elements of human behaviour that sparked laughter were flatulence and mild sexual mischief. Language appeared only 2m years after the first laugh, enabling people to combine laughter and words into numerous refinements, from amusement at a joke to sneering at a rival.
Marcus Brigstocke, the comedian and scriptwriter for the BBC television series Have I got News for You?, said that the idea of a primitive origin for laughter could be supported by the observation that farts and adults stumbling are among the few things that the smallest children find funny.
He said this was reflected in his live shows: “If you trip over it will always get a bigger laugh than anything that is beautifully constructed and has been passed between the finest comedy writers in the country.”
He added, however, that adults’ appreciation of such humour may also contain an element of cruelty — a type of humour academics say came only with the evolution of speech. “People suddenly and undeservingly stripped of dignity is always funny,” said Brigstocke.
The theory that humour began as a benign force contradicts several other recent theories of why people laugh, including one published in 2001 which claimed that laughing evolved because smiling was too easy to fake by cheating humans trying to break into a group.
Gervais and his colleague David Sloan Wilson devised their theory after reviewing more than 100 studies of laughter covering isolated aspects such as psychology, archeology, history and neurology.
The researchers believe that the forerunner of laughter was the panting noise made by apes and chimpanzees, often in response to tickling, which is believed by scientists to be a way of preserving harmonious relations in a family or other group.
The academics believe that man became more upright as he evolved in Africa, partly because he needed more mobility at a time of increased competition for food.
The shortages of the period — known as the Pliocene epoch — also led to a need for improved group solidarity so that food could be hunted and gathered more effectively.
“Witnessing another individual unexpectedly trip or slip (from an awkward bipedal gait?) while simultaneously recognising the non-seriousness of the mishap often elicits laughter in humans today,” says the study, which appears this week in the Quarterly Review of Biology. “Such a mishap could have become a potent elicitor of laughter in early hominids as a result of Pliocene pressures for increased social play.”
