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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.
Audience---------------------------------------S(male) A(male). 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. Number of . . . 502 . .86 .
For instance, speakers laugh more than their audiences (doh), and women laugh at men more than men laugh at women. ____________________________________________ _Laughter: a Scientific Investigation_ is just that. .185 . Ah."He notes that "at study's end, we faced a sober reckoning. 71S(f)A(m) . 80 . Episodes . 76% .60%S(fem) A(fem) .
Speaker . Well, maybe not so unobvious after all Anyway, here's his Laugh Matrix, where S = speaker and A = audience . Or, in the case of I Pagliacci, Leoncavallo instructs the singer to "laugh bitterly". Sorry.He also suckered some poor grad student and his (Provine's) wife(). .55Hmm, be darned if I can get this to format right in Ammie's primitive word-processor.
275 . .238 . .66 . Too professorial for easy reading, but some cool, unobvious stuff. The sensible ones simply insert "laugh" into the score.
into analyzing 60 opera scores to see how the composers scored laughter. In Italian, ie "Ah. Ah. We learned a lot more about opera than about laughter."Oh, and laugh tracks really do work.
% Laughing . Ah. 50S(m)A(f) . .
Ah. Great cover, though.Happy reading--Pete Tillman
He takes a fascinating look into how laughter can serve as a powerful probe into social behaviours. A purely simple behaviour at a glimpse, laughter has largely been under-studied. 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. 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. Laughter is an exceptionally entertaining book. It is not a complex read, but a must-read for the inquisitive-minded individual.
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. IMHO, this doesn't yield any valuable conceptual insights into humor. Another interesting (and more formalized) attempt to conceptualize creative thinking (including humor) is being developed by some cognitive linguists (Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner). 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. Their concepts seem to go along very well with Koestler's findings. You might want to check out their book "The Way We Think".
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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