3 Takeaways - The Surprising Science of Why We Laugh (#285)

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

We think laughter is a response to something funny.A joke. A punchline. A light moment.But listen closely to real conversations, and laughter shows up in places that are far more important than we realize - and often when nothing is funny at all.Neuroscientist Sophie Scott CBE reveals what laughter really signals, how it works, and why it quietly shapes our relationships, our hierarchies, and our sense of belonging.Sophie Scott is a professor at University College London and one of the world’s leading researchers on the science of laughter.

We tend to think of laughter as a reaction to something funny, a punchline, a joke, a moment of humor. But when you listen to laughter in real everyday conversations, a much stranger picture starts to emerge. So if laughter isn't really about humor, what is it for? And why does laughter matter more than we think? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Toman and this is three takeaways. On three takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists.

Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with neuroscientist Sophie Scott. She studies the science of laughter. It turns out that everything is. we think we know about laughter is wrong. Laughter is not even primarily a response to humor. I'm excited to learn more.

Welcome, Sophie, and thanks so much for our conversation today. Hello, and thank you very much for inviting me. Why is laughter worth taking seriously? I think because it's probably one of the more important emotional expressions that we use socially. If you ask people about what makes them laugh, they'll talk about comedy, in jokes and humour. But if you actually look at people, what they do is they laugh when they're in company. Laughter is a social behaviour. You are 30, three zero times more likely to laugh. There's somebody else with you than if you're on your own and you'll laugh more if you know those people

and you'll laugh more if you like those people. And that's why you shouldn't think of it as an expression of amusement actually because most of the time laughter has got nothing whatsoever to do with jokes. It's a social joy. It's a joy that you experience when you're with other people. So I think you can think of laughter as being an expression of a sort of play socially delightful joy is something you experience when you're with other people. Now, that might be on a screen or it might be in real life, but there has to be that sense of a social connection for it to start happening. It's possible to laugh on your own.

It's just much less likely. So I think from that perspective, it's really worth valuing laughter and taking laughter seriously because it's an emotional expression, but it's one that lives in social interactions. And that makes it very, very interesting because unlike emotions like, so fear and disgust or surprise. I was once walking down the street and slipped on some ice. I didn't completely fall over, but I slipped enough.

I completely produced an involuntary vocalization of surprise. Oh, like that. Absolutely involuntary. And there's nothing social about that at all. That was just an emotion, I was just being driven off because I don't know quite where this is going, but something's happening. Because laughter doesn't work that way.

Laughter, you do find that people laugh when they're on their own, but it's much, much less likely. It's primarily happening in these social interactions. And it's happening in a highly communicative way, as well as a sort of basic emotional expression way. So people will use laughter to show that they know and they're affiliated with the people that they're talking to. And also it's worth taking seriously because it works.

We will use laughter for lots of different reasons, but a really important reason why humans will use laughter is to reduce stress. And it's very effective at that as long as everybody joins in. If you share laughter together, you will feel better together. I can actually use it to negotiate a better mood together, which makes it a very important emotion.

So if you want people to laugh, what do you do? It's interesting because there's no one thing that everybody finds funny. And that's like a truism for humor. There is no one joke everybody finds funny. There's no one comedian, everybody finds funny. Even slapstick humor, which is much more broad in its reach, there'll be somebody somewhere going, oh, that's not funny.

My brother died that way. So I don't try to get people laughing nowadays when I'm doing things in the lab. I don't bother trying to use humour at all. What we use are videos of normally television presenters who get the giggles while they're broadcasting. And they have to keep talking because they're on air. And that's actually very effective because that just leans into the fact that laughter is highly contagious. A lot of the laughter we produce is happening just because we've heard or seen somebody else laughing. And if you watch a video of somebody desperately trying to do a broadcast while they're really trying not to laugh at the laugh that keeps coming through, there's strong clues that that's spontaneous laughter. That is authentic laughter, but also they're desperately trying to cover it up, which makes it almost funnier than if they just started laughing. So that works very, very well to get people laughing. And it doesn't require you to find anything funny and it doesn't require you to know any of the people involved. So a lot of the ones we use are actually from the US. So the people in the UK don't know who those people

are, but they still laugh when they start laughing. So interesting. Are people who laugh a lot happier? Very, very hard to know. So everybody underestimates how often they laugh. There aren't many studies on this, but every study that has got people to give a rating of how often they laugh and then actually observes them, finds that everybody is underreporting their laughter. It's like we don't remember it almost. So it's difficult because you can't rely on people's self-report. We've been developing a questionnaire about laughter and we found that the single biggest factor that sort of varies across certainly adults in the UK and in China about laughter is how much people think they laugh. So it is a big thing that people think about their laughter and how much they do or

don't laugh a lot. But we can't find any predicted value of that. So there's no relationship that we found so far between how much people think they laugh and how much they actually do laugh. But I think the other thing that's true is if you remember that laughter doesn't happen randomly. Laughter happens when you're in certain social situations and people won't laugh if they're feeling really uncomfortable, even if they're with other people. And they won't laugh if they're feeling very kind of exposed or like they're on show. So one of the easiest ways to get people to stop laughing is to get them into the lab and say, now laugh. They just don't do it. They won't do it. So I think it's possible that people who are happier laugh more. but it's also possible that people who laugh more are happier.

The direction of causality is probably more like a virtuous circle, both affects the other. But all of it's only possible because of the people that you're laughing with. That's going to be affecting your mood as well. I can remember when I was a child, my father was a salesman and I used to, he was very good at using laughter socially. He was funny and people liked him because he was funny and he would make people laugh. He was a funny, witty man. But I used to genuinely worry that people were buying, he sold carpets. I was really worried that people would end up buying more carpets than they wanted to because he was making them laugh.

Don't worry about this. But I'd notice even from a young age that he laughed completely differently when he was with his friends, mostly female friends, but he had a handful. Most people do. You don't have all that many really close friends. And he laughed totally differently when he was with his close friends. It was almost kittenish. There was none of that kind of dominating, controlling the room sort of element to his laughter. He was just delighted at being with his friends.

And I think everyone sort of has that. You're laughing with a lot of different people, but you're laughing really intensely and in a real relaxed way, I think, we're not with just anybody. And I think that's again with some of the power of laughter comes, because if you think of laughter as being a really effective way of making and maintaining social bonds, and that's again, one of the things you find about laughter, wherever you find it, is often playing this role. Do people in conversation mirror each other in laughter also? I think they do. if you think about contagion as being like that. So contagion, behavioural contagion, it's actually quite common in social animals.

So if you look at a behaviour like yawning, yawning is very, very common in animals. Many animals yawns, but lots of animals also yawn contagiously. So they yawn just because they have seen or heard another conspecific yawning. And it's a social signal. It's a sign of affiliation. And you find it in humans. You find it in dogs and chimps.

You find it in turtles and budger regards. So that's really, really widespread. And there are quite a lot of behaviours that work this way. So blinking is quite contagious. Coughing is contagious. Scratching is contagious. And it's pretty complex. So if you look at orangutans, they scratch contagiously.

And actually, it's a sign of anxiety in an orangutang. So if an orangutan is scratching itself, that means it's anxious. And if another orangutan picks up that, it mirrors back that scratching, they're basically indicating, oh yeah, I know what you mean. This is, that isn't great. So you have this whole world of sort of contagious behaviors, and they tend to have this affiliative element to them. And it's also true for laughter.

However, humans are the only animals where contagious laughter has been shown. So other animals laugh, but they don't laugh contagiously. They don't just catch a laugh, which makes it very interesting, partly also because it's something we learn to do. So contagious behaviors are not things we're born, doing. Babies don't blink unless they need to refresh their eyes. They don't yawn when somebody else yawns. They don't laugh when somebody else laughs. So we teach babies to do these contagious behaviours. And then that becomes a very important aspect of social interactions. The ability

to mirror laughter back at each other very effectively is a great way for laughter to spread in a group of people. And it's also a great way of, if you think about it, it's having this very important affiliative role. It's a great way of sort of getting that affiliative mirroring, running in a very unconscious way. People very rarely notice that they're doing it. If you ask them why they're doing it, they will come up with a reason. They'll say, well, that was funny. But in fact, it wasn't. It was just contagion. So if laughter helps develop social ties and connections, are there people that use laughter transactional? Definitely. If you think of that use of laughter to regulate emotions, so to deal with stressful situations, that's actually quite a common use of laughter

in, we don't worry about it when it works, that it can be a way that some people will laugh to deal with sometimes with situations that are quite serious. When the Roger, I'm going to say his name wrong, that man at Fox, who had been a serial harasser of female colleagues, they made the film bombshell about it. And then 2016, lots of women started to tell their stories.

And he had quite a formal way of sort of propositioning women. And the number of women who said, when he'd propositioned them, that they'd laughed. And they were laughing to try and de-escalate that situation, to say, I know you don't mean it. I know that you're just kidding. And to give him a plausible out, like I was just messing around. But of course, he can say, oh, they're laughing. They're fine.

They're enjoying it. There's a real complexity there that people's interpretation of laughter is as important as the intention somebody has with their laugh. It can be something that people will also use to try and cover up other things that are more serious. Lie to you, for example, and use the language. laughter is sort of cloak to say, well, none of this matters. This is all just fun. So definitely that's possible. And I think it's like a whole of mirrors laughter. The complexity of it in terms of both why it's being produced and how it is perceived is very, very non-fixed. It's just because you want to laugh to be interpreted in a positive way. It doesn't mean to say

somebody necessarily will do so. So I had a horrible situation at work, just horrible, when a colleague rang up, a colleague with whom I already had quite a difficult relationship, not something I knew well, but I relied on facilities associated with this person, so I had to keep them sweet. And they called up to complain about something. And while they were calling up to complain, someone in the room with me started laughing. And nothing, I could say, could prevent them from believing that not only had I offended them and they were complaining about it, but now we were all laughing at them. Now, they were anticipating negative. They were not in a good mood with me.

But that's not why the laughter happened. In fact, the laughter was me looking at a student going, what have you done? Like, seriously, what's going on here? The student laughed because she was embarrassed. But it didn't matter. It didn't matter what I said. So the complexity is manifold.

It's complex in terms of why you produce it, and it's complex in terms of how somebody perceives it and how they choose to interpret it. For spontaneous laughter, how does that affect both the person laughing and any listener? I suspect probably one of the nice things about spontaneous laughter, because you feel really good when you've been laughing anyway, but spontaneous laughter, you do, it sounds like the sun coming out and it feels wonderful. You do get big physiological changes when you laugh full stop, but particularly if you start laughing hard, like a real spontaneous laugh. So you get a change in the uptake of the body's naturally circulating painkillers, which are endorphins. And that's why you feel buzzy and good when you've been laughing. It's exactly the same as a, anything you might do after exercise, which is when you also get an endorphin hit. You get a runner's high and you've been laughing.

You also get a reduction in adrenaline. And that endorphin buzz you get from any kind of laughter, even really fakes laughter. It seems to be to do with how you're engaging your rib cage. But you also get a change in adrenaline. Adrenaline is that vital flight hormone that makes your heart start racing and you're scared. And that is lower after you've been laughing than it was before you were laughing. While you're actually laughing, it tends to go up because you're doing quite a lot of work. It's quite stressful for your heart when you're laughing.

You also get a reduction in cortisol associated with laughter. Cortisol is a stress hormone. It's what wakes you up in the morning. It's why waking up in the morning can sometimes feel a bit grim. And it's also the hormone that runs at high levels when you are feeling stressed and you sleep badly and your appetite goes over and you don't feel right. That's cortisol at work. And high levels of cortisol running chronically is not good for your mental health.

It's not good for your physical health. It has a slower lag than adrenaline, which works really quickly. So it works much more slowly cortisol. But you find cortisol levels drop off when people have been laughing. So you're feeling less stressed, you're feeling more relaxed. That is wonderful. So we should all laugh more. Definitely, definitely.

In high stress situations or jobs like police officers or doctors and nurses in hospitals, is laughter different? Is there more laughter to desperse? stress? There does seem to be. So this has been studied less about laughter, but more about jokes, but of course the jokes are an attempt to get laughter going. What you find in high stress professions, like the police or the fire service or medics or nurses, you tend to find that there are professional jokes, things around which people joke. So in the UK, apparently one of the things that the police laugh about in the UK is the fire service. They make jokes about the fire service

and presumably vice versa. And they also will make jokes about the things that they have to deal with, which can make their humour seem very dark. But actually, I think that's doing several things all at once. So it's giving people a reason to laugh together. You're doing a high-stress job in a team. You're going to improve your sense of bonding by getting a chance to laugh together. You are going to be able to deal with some of the stressful things you have to deal with by

expressly laughing at it. You are going to feel better together by laughing at things. things. You are keeping other people out. You're excluding people with the darkness of the thing that you're laughing at and the really specific job-related aspects of that. I don't think that's random. It's meant to be a bit shocking to other people because this is actually, you're the team that has to work together. They are the outsiders. They don't understand. There is a literature to describing this. And over the past couple of years, there's been a number of cases in the UK where WhatsApp groups between police officers have been made public.

and revealing awful things, like some horrible crime scene where two sisters were killed in a park in the middle of London, in a very public place, and it was a very, very horrible thing. And one of the police officers who had to stand guard over the scene

took inappropriate photographs and put them on the WhatsApp group of this crime scene, I absolutely guarantee you they were trying to be funny. It doesn't make it funny, but I'm uncertain that's what the intent was, and that's one of the reasons

why it was so shocking. I'm not saying it's right at all, But that's, I think, an extreme example of this, what you find in high-stress jobs, which often is this very dark sense of humor, which is still aimed at getting laughter, but also really an exaggerated way keeping other people out. Before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with, is there anything else that's important about laughter that you would like to mention? What should I have asked you that I did not? People always want to know it's different between men and women. pretty much everything I've talked about here is the same for men and women. The only thing that comes up a bit is that everybody laughs more contagiously with someone they know than someone they don't know.

Male and female familiarity absolutely rules for contagious laughter. I think women may have learned to use laughter was perhaps a way of managing situations with unfamiliar men who can be something of a little bit of a mixed bag. Sophie, this has been great. What are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with, today. The first one is laughter is never neutral and that's why it can sometimes be something that alarms you or amuses you, but it always has meaning and your brain is always trying to work out that meaning. It's a very good tell about when things feel a little bit off if laughter is wrong

or if laughter is absent. So I think that's an important thing to remember. Listen to your own laughter. Who do you laugh with? Who makes you laugh? Who doesn't make you laugh? If you know someone who seems to laugh in a really irritating way. I bet you don't like them. Because actually, it's you not joining in with the laughter as often as anything. And you're not laughing along. Because you're like, I don't have that kind of relationship. And I think value your laughter. Because laughter, maybe it feels childlike, it feels trivial. It doesn't feel civilized and sophisticated. And comedies never win Oscars. And people who are comedians are always sort of assumed to be improvising on the spot rather than an incredibly polished artists. But actually, laughter really matters. In your day-to-day laugh, it's probably one of the

most important things you do in your day is the time when you're just chatting to colleagues with a cup of coffee and having a laugh about something that happened in a meeting. That feels like wasted time, but it's actually probably some of the most important time in your day. So value your laughter. Make time for it. That's wonderful advice. Thank you, Sophie. This has been terrific. It's absolutely pleasure. Lovely to meet you. Thank you. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at Three Takeaways.com, where you can also listen to previous episodes.

You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. for listening.