Endless Thread - Best of Summer: The 100-million-year origin story of laughter and humor

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

The first documented bar joke was copied onto a clay tablet 4,000 years ago in the ancient language of Sumerian. Scholars have translated it, but the meaning remains lost. After the Twitter account @DepthsOfWiki posted the joke in March, thousands of people attempted to decipher it to no avail. Yet, as cryptic as the bar joke may be, it offers clues into humor’s role in human civilizations and raises questions about when humor — and its sibling laughter — first emerged. In this episode, the second of two parts, Endless Thread continues its journey attempting to deconstruct the beginnings of humor and explain an unexplainable joke from the forgotten tablets of the past.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Ben, do you think you're funny? My kids and my wife and my co-host all have given me a lot of proof that I'm hilarious. Oh, no. I've done too much laughing at your jokes. That's fair. Well, it's time for a summer jam remix, part two. Remix. B-side, whatever it is. It's the second installment of our Sumerian joke series. Let it rip before my hilarious co-host tries anything funny. Hey folks, you're listening to Part 2 of our story on the origin of jokes and humor. If you missed the first episode, go back and listen to that or don't, but you may not get the joke.

Anyway, enjoy the show. Last time on Endless Thread. So can you read it for us? In Sumerian? Yeah, let's start there. So in Sumerian, it reads, Urgi Rei Estamche Inkuma, in English that means something like a dog entered into a tavern and said, probably, I cannot see anything,

I shall open this or this one. I don't get it. I don't get it. What can a dog open? They don't have thumbs. So we're blasting down the hunt. highway. Amory is behind the wheel. Next.

You tell me, what are you doing next? Oh, wow. So your team not joke? I'm team humorous saying. So maybe we're talking Seinfeld rather than Bob Hope. Okay. I like it. Ben, Amory.

Dean Russell. D-D-Dog? Do either of you know what like a baby chimpanzee is called. Oh. An imp. A chimpling. A chimpette.

It's a very technical term. It's called a chimp off the old block. Oh, Dean. We walked right into that one. So, yeah, I have the humor from last episode has not improved, but I would like to. No, you converted it all from dog humor to chimp humor. It's evolved. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, I promise that that is my one and only joke. And the reason that I bring you this terrible chimp joke will become clear in a moment. That reason starts, though, with the big questions from last episode. One, what does this Sumerian dog in a bar joke mean? Like, why is it funny? And two, why does it matter? Like why do so many people online and in academia?

Why are they all trying to like confirm that it's a joke and solve its meaning? Yeah, because we want to know like why we all think it's a joke, right? Like it has this like universal. There's something about it that feels universal, which feels like a good joke. And there's meaning in that universality. Yeah. And so something I think both of you said. last episode, something we heard from Phil, Jones, the guy at the Penn Museum, was that this bar joke is likely one of the first documented examples of humor.

And if we can firmly establish that the bar joke is, you know, like a bar joke and sort out what makes it funny. Which I feel like we did a pretty good job of. True, sort of, true, yes. But let's say, like, if we can firmly settle those things, that gives us a clue about how we humans came to be the people that we are today. And it, like, gives us some sense of the role humor has played in our development into what I would argue is a pretty unique species. And boy, do we need some of that human humor these days. We do. So for this part of the story, I'm going to do my best to, like, bring all of these things to, like, bring all of these things to,

together and firmly answer those questions. Like, what's it mean? Why is it matter? So we can get at this greater meaning. And our, like, extremely circuitous mystery is going to go a little bit more bananas. Ew. Sorry. You said the jokes were done. I'm keeping a sharp eye out. You're out. I'm ready. Ready. Let's hear we go. We're going further back than Sumer, further back than tablets, further back than people. We're going to the dawn of the apes. I'm Amory Siebertson. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Today's episode, the second of two parts in which producer Dean Russell helps us deconstruct the origins of humor and explain an unexplainable joke.

from the forgotten tablets of the past. Part two jokes. Stand up. Excited chimps. And it's probably because they heard me over here. How's my best girl? So you see the chimp who's kind of making the duck face at me? That's Ruby.

And this is Jen. And she always greased me like that when she sees me. Haru. That's my girl. Jennifer Ireland's in charge of the mammals. at the North Carolina Zoo, which is like this enormous zoo directly in the middle of the state. And a few weeks ago, Jen took me to this half-acre forest with, you know, rolling hills and arboreal jungle gyms and mysteriously like a fake termite mound.

But just this like surreal little plot where the chimpanzees live. So in this habitat, I don't know how many chimps are here today. One, two, three, four, five, six, okay. There should be about nine chimps out here today. And in front of us, we have Jeannie, who's in the back. She has a really dark face. We have Lance here on the left. And the reason I'm here, and by here, I mean, like, at the top of this Helix staircase,

looking down at the chimps, chimps named Ruby and Jeannie and Lance and Obie, who is this, like, cute toddler chimp who's doing cartwheels. The reason I'm here is because I'm trying to figure out how this Sumerian joke came to be. Okay, so why are we talking about chimps? This is kind of me rabbit-hulling because my initial reading into the origin of jokes sent me into reading about the origin of humor, which sent me into reading about the evolution of laughter. And so we're going to start there at the bottom of the rabbit hole. Where does laughter come from?

I had this idea that maybe laughter started as a cultural thing. Maybe it even started with the Sumerians. Like maybe that's why they have the first documented jokes. But then when I looked into it, I learned something that I didn't know. I learned that laughter is not a human only thing. Yeah, chimpanzees definitely laugh. Usually when they laugh, there's been some sort of physical contact. They will tickle each other, they'll pinch each other, they'll wrestle each other.

So they are laughing all the time when there's that type of physical contact. To me, this fact was kind of mind-blowing. Chimps, you know, which share 99% of our DNA, they have a funny phone. chimpanzees laugh a little different than humans. Humans, when they laugh, it's all on the exhalation, right? When we're laughing, it's all the noise is coming out. Chimpanzees, their laugh is on the inhalation and the exhalation, and it's kind of a panting sound.

So it sounds kind of like... So, Ben and Amory, I just slacked you this video. Oh, my God. What is going on? Was one of them, like, breathing into the other? person's chimp's mouth? To me it looks like a parent over a juvenile, and they're being silly together.

That's what I'm seeing. There are two chimps here named Kendall and Tammy, and they're in this, like, rugby huddle. They're, like, bent over at the waist, and they're tickling each other. Oh. This odd, like, panting laughter is, like, their way of just saying like, oh my God, this is fun.

Not only can you hear them laughing, but you can see Kendall's mouth and you can see that his mouth is wide open. And so he's got a big play face on that's just another way to communicate. I love what is going on. Not only my laughing, but my face is telling you how happy I am and how much I am enjoying this interaction. Lefter is also called a play vocalization, like in scientific circles. There's a theory that it evolved from heavy breathing.

which maybe Amory, that's what you're referring to. It sounds like heavy breathing. And it's a really crucial communication and bond-building tool, like with this tickling. And it's also an extremely effective tool for learning. What do you mean? Well, you know how like when you're a kid and you're rough housing but also giggling? Why does it you mean when you're a kid? I don't know.

I'm still doing that. chimps do this same thing, especially when they're young. They play fight, which is extremely important because it trains like a young inn on how to defend themselves. And biologists have actually done tests and found that in certain groups, play fighting can turn into real fighting if one of those youngans like don't have a voice box, meaning they can't laugh. Whoa. Yeah, exactly. They can't communicate that it's all good fun. and so it kind of escalates into real fighting.

So you need laughter, and it also encourages that learning to keep going because it's something that's fun, so you'll keep doing it. See, this makes total sense to me as a dad, I will say. Like, I rough house with my kids all the time. And the way that I can tell whether or not, like, I'm, because I'm so much bigger than my kids, and the way that I can tell whether or not they are playing well together and whether or not I am playing well with them

is completely auditory, I would say, almost completely auditory, you know? Because you're like listening for the way that people react. And if they're like squealing with joy versus like squealing with pain, there's like a difference there. There's an audible difference.

Ultimately, what we're talking about here is non-language communication, right? Like, so Amory, you asked the question, why chimps? And I started with chimps because they are the closest cousin species with humans. We share a common ancestor from about 8 to 6 million years ago.

And because we both laugh, this actually suggests to scientists that laughter precedes humans. It is very probably also at least 6 million years old. Whoa. Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans are all apes. We're all related to each other. And laughter seems to serve the same purpose in every one of those species. But like the wild thing to me is that laughter may actually be even older. Last year, these two UCLA scientists, they documented play vocalizations, these proto laughs, in 65 different species.

Apes and monkeys and black bears and rats and seals, they all voluble. vocalize during play. And this suggests that the first laugh, the first laugh ever, that may have come from a common ancestor 100 million years ago. Whoa. Wow. You see, are you saying the thin lobe fin fish was cracking up when it came out of the walk, when it came out of the monk? Hey, I'm almost walking here. I don't get it.

I thought it was good. Oh, I do get it. Never mind. Jesus Christ. But Dean, when you started, you mentioned humor, which I feel like is more complicated, maybe, and more to the point of the Sumerian joke. Humor in my mind is like, it's like more of a story maybe that causes laughter or like an idea. It's less like tickling or something, but more like an intellectual presentation that people react that animals react to. Yeah, so for this, I, you know, I'd like to, I'd like us to think about a moment in Seinfeld. Ben, as you know, I've been working my way through Seinfeld recently.

And as I was writing this story, I landed on this like one episode where Kramer goes to see chimpanzees. I stopped to look at the monkeys when all of a sudden I am hit in the face with a banana peel. I turn and look. and there is this monkey really laughing it up. All right, I'm going to say setting aside the fact that Kramer refers to chimps as monkeys, which is not true. Chimps have actually done stuff like this. Like they've thrown feces at zoo guests and they've had the same sort of semi-loughing reaction. And what I want to know from you two is like, would you call that humor?

Would I call hitting one of your jailers with your own excrement humorous? Yes, I would. I mean, it's all humor. They're just different kinds. Would I call it like witty? No. But it's definitely got some quality slapstick potential right there. Well, you know what's interesting to you is I think it's like the perspective matters.

So, like, it may not be humor to the person who got hit with the excrement or the chimp throwing the excrement. But if another chimp witnesses it and it's, like, not involved in the action, but, like, that is them witnessing the story, right? Yeah. So, like, that feels like more humor, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So with that in mind, I have one more video for you all to watch. Okay, so I'm looking at a single chimp sitting on top of this little platform and the chimp is next to a big old pile of hay.

Yeah, tossing some hay into a pile of hay. And someone's reacting. Someone's like kind of laughing. Oh, there's another monkey under the pile of straw. They're not monkeys, Ben. They're chimps. I'm sorry, they're chimps. There's another chimp under the straw.

hiding. And they're all having a great time about it. But the one that, like, popped out of the straw was clearly laughing and knew that there was a joke being played here. That was the bend of the bunch, laughing at its own joke. I thought it was pretty interesting to compare this to the Sumerian joke because to me it has a very similar structure, right? Like you have a setup, which is Terry is hanging out near some hay. then, I mean, that's like setting an expectation. And then Ruthie, who is hiding in the hay,

she sits up and then breaks your expectation, and that's the punchline. Yeah. Okay. I buy it. Would you describe it as humor? You know, it's kind of hard to say what's funny to a chimp and what's funny to a person, right?

You know, it's the whole, did someone slip on a banana peel? Do they find that funny? I was pretty excited by this video because I saw this as chimp's laughing at chimp comedy. I was thinking, like, no way is the Sumerian joke one of the first jokes. Maybe, like, the first joke is actually like 100 million years old.

But then Jen, she was like, no. They're not really laughing, but a pant grunt is kind of a greeting, a really positive vocalization. And I think that part of that spurred on by the reaction of the keepers in the video because they're all laughing. And they're like, oh. You know, this is humor, no doubt. But I wasn't thinking of this as like a joke. I guess I have associated the word joke more with words than with like, like a, like this feels like a prank, which maybe some people would say they're kind of the same thing. But I guess to me, I would not call the Ruthie Terry scenario a joke, but it is humorous.

It is humor. So when I mean, when I saw this, I was like, this is humor for sure. sure. But, you know, the difference here is that, like, the chimps themselves are not actually laughing. It sounds like laughter, but it's this pant grunt. And there's, like, a subtle difference. These chimps are putting on a show for the zookeepers. And when the keepers laugh, the chimps get really excited, and then they pant grunt. They don't laugh. And so the similarity here is, like, think about all of those apes you've read about who, like, have sign language, who use sign language. Dr. Patterson claims Coco has a working vocabulary of about 450 signs.

They learned it from humans. So, like, they don't sign with other apes in the wild, and it's the same thing here. If you want to call this a joke, that's fine, or if you want to call it humor, that's fine. But it doesn't indicate that jokes are millions of years old, like laughs. Because things like this only happen when chimps are interacting with humans. They learned it from humans. And this suggests that humor is a purely human development. Whoa.

I'm not going to ever get used to that. But I'm guessing we will learn more from Dean as we go along here. Yep. We'll get some more in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more. than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music.

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And as far as I can see, there is no good evidence for animals in the wild, mammals in the wild, primates in the wild, showing anything that looks like humor. Who's this? After getting a handle on where laughter comes from, I called Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London, because I wanted to understand how did humor come about? It certainly makes me realize a lot more

about my own laughter. So if I've noticed that, like, I have a relative who was always laughing and, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, and I really found her laughter very irritating. And I was always like, oh, she laughed so stupidly. Look at that stupid laughter.

And working with the laughter made me realize, actually, there was nothing whatsoever strange about her laughter. What was odd about it was that I didn't join in, and I don't join in, because I don't like her.

Oh, man, Sophie is a woman after my own heart. Yeah, Sophie really helped me understand the Sumerian joke because she's written about ancient humor, among other things, and that's actually how we found her. She's written about Sumerian jokes and Egyptian jokes, and she told me that, like, Romans were really into crucifixion humor for some reason. There's one joke about two Romans, walking along and they look up to see a popular athlete

has been crucified and one of them says to the other, oh, he's really flying now. Oh my gosh. I know. I know. I don't get this joke. All right, maybe Sophie and I are not as akin as I thought. I swear, I thought you guys were going to find

that Roman thing funny. But I guess despite that, she really does know a lot about the mechanics of laughter and humor? Right from the outset, there are things that will make human babies laugh that don't make other infants laugh. And those are non-physical things like playing peekaboo or talking funny. Exactly. So again, actually babies, humans are able to pick up on someone's playful

intentions without touch being involved. Peekaboo is considered non-physical comedy? Yeah, like in the sense that there's no person-to-person touching involved. Like non-human laughter is based on that really close contact. But humans are different in that we laugh when talking with each other and watching performance. Essentially, we laugh at stories. And we tell these stories, funny stories, aka jokes, we tell them in part because laughing feels good. You also see an increased uptake in the naturally circulating endorphins, and that's your body's natural painkillers. And you see that when you've been laughing, which is one of the reasons where you get a nice warm, buzzy feeling when you've been laughing. It's exactly the same as if you've been exercising.

Human social bonding is partly based on endorphins. And so the stuff that makes us feel really close is often the stuff that fuels those endorphins, like singing together and eating. together and dancing together and especially laughing together. So like if I tell a stranger a joke and we both laugh, we're actually biologically building a bond. And I mean, think about like how much time both of you have spent laughing together. Amory apparently does not even need the jokes to be done, to be finished to start laughing. Okay, let's hear it.

What do you call a blonde skin? Apparently this joke is hilarious. Okay, I want to go back to the chimps for a second, because it sounds like they bond through laughter, too. But that laughter happens in very close quarters with, like, tickling and play fighting. So the difference is what? Right. They're not telling stories like the Sumerian joke to make each other laugh and bond. Is that because they don't have, like, the same kind of language that we do? Partially, yeah.

But maybe not in the way that you're thinking. Now, I'm going to take a few sharp turns here, so bear with me. But buckle up. Hold on to the handle that's above the door. Exactly. We're ready. Sometime after that 8 to 6 million years split between the chimp line and the human line, humans or, you know, proto-humans, their brains started to change. They became more complex.

And you can see this in how laughter happens in our brains today. Because neurologically speaking, humans have two different laughs. Think about the last time you started laughing and you could not stop laughing. You're a really involuntary laughter. You may be desperately trying to stop and you can't stop. That is a different kind of laughter and it seems to be based in different brain areas than laughter which to some degree is, want to a better phrase, volitional. involuntary and volitional?

Is this like a real laugh and a fake laugh? Not exactly. It's more like an involuntary crying belly laugh, which is kind of rare. I'm sorry, Ben, you should know this. This happens to me every single tracking session we do, where we probably have so many of these on tape, where just for whatever reason, all of a sudden, I cannot keep it together. Yeah.

And I'm trying to, but I just, I cannot. Exactly. She gets the giggles. He can't stop her. I'm Amory Severson. That's all it takes. And you're listening to endless thread. This happens every time. So there's that kind of laughter, and then there's like every other kind of laugh that humans exhibit.

Whoa. An involuntary laugh is literally one that you can't control, as Amory described. you're rolling on the floor, whatever. A volitional laugh is not something you necessarily intend to do or, like, fake. It's voluntary in the sense that you could stop it in the middle of a laugh if you had to, or you could stifle a laugh because, like, you're at a funeral or something like that. This is most of our laughter. So you're saying, like, even when someone tells you a joke, unless you're amory,

it's probably a volitional laugh. Right. or a mix of both. And the reason I bring this up is because these two laughs, they travel different pathways in the brain. Belly laughs, Amory laughs, follow this one pathway through the middle of your brain, one that goes through a region for involuntary functions.

Now that is evolutionarily older. We share that with all other mammals. And it's associated with much more reactive vocalization. organizations often that are more emotional and sort of automatic. This is how chimps laugh. Their brains have the same pathway. But a volitional laugh goes through something called the lateral motor area, which is only in humans. And that's something I'm using right now when I talk.

It's something you don't find in other primates, and it's associated with voluntary control over our bodies. So humans aren't only able to talk because they've got the right shape vocal track. They've also got a brain that can control that vocal tract. As Sophie says this evolved brain pathway for human only laughs, it is the same pathway that we use for controlling speech, for complex language and for storytelling, for joke telling, which means that it is possible, maybe even probable, that just as humans were developed,

the ability to tell jokes, they were simultaneously developing the ability to laugh at those jokes. So, okay, what does this tell us about why the Sumerian joke matters? I'm going to take us back to the Penn Museum and Phil Jones. So how old is this? This is just under 5,000 years old. As far as we know, homo sapiens are the only living species that can talk about things that we have never seen, touched, or smelled, or experienced. It's unclear when exactly this first came about.

Some evidence suggests 100,000 years ago, some suggest 35,000 years ago. But somewhere in there, humans began to tell fictions and myths and stories. The tablet over here on the left, like the one that, you know, I didn't read it yet, but it says Gilgamesh on the, like, description of it. And over here, that one is beautiful and tiny and complex. And we told Proverbs. A dog knows, take it. It does not know, put it down. And we told jokes. So a dog came to a brothel and said, one does not see anything. Let me open this one.

And historians have suggested that it's our ability. to tell all of these fictions that allowed humans to expand their social groups from the small-sized troops that chimps have, which is like 20 or so, to literally millions of people,

religions and cities and nations. Like Sumer? Yeah, because Sumer was just a collection of disparate people who, several tens of thousands of years earlier, would have nothing to do with each other. But our fictions can travel and shape our ideals and cultures

and bring small troops of people together into giant communities. For instance, to know that someone else, maybe someone you've never met, to know that they find a story funny, that you find funny, that's an instantaneous sign that we're on the same team, the in-group. And if they don't share your fictions, then they're in the out-group. And so Sumer comes after this cognitive leap, out of the agricultural revolution, which produced so much food that in 3,500 BCE, it became hard to keep track of it all.

It's interesting to read this description and have it be like, we invented writing because people couldn't remember. So, as Phil told us, Sumerians invented writing. First to count the clay pots filled with food and then they realized they could record more complex ideas. They started to set their fictions down in stone and clay so that they could travel geographically and through time. This Sumerian joke from the dawn of writing matters because it is documented evidence of this moment.

It is one of the first instances in which a fiction was written down and its meaning passed to another person who would read it and laugh and their endorphins would jump and they would feel a connection with their community, their Sumerian Babylonian culture in which this joke was rooted. It's like reading a joke on a subreddit and thinking this community gets me, except that it happened several thousand years before the internet. But Dean, what did all this tell you about? the meaning of this joke, a dog walks into a bar and can't see a thing and opens this one. What did all of this tell you about why that's funny?

What all of this told me is that this joke is not funny. Not us. And no matter what we do, it never will be. I mean, like Phil and his theory about the watchdog who opens the front door of the brothel, he might be right, but so could anyone else. just don't know. Because Sumerians, Babylonians, they're the in-group. We're on the outs. We were never meant to find it funny. And as Sophie Scott, the neuroscientist, told me, that's okay. Yeah. It's fantastic, isn't it? Why do you say that's fantastic? Because it's so obviously a joke.

But also, like, why was that funny? What did those words mean that we aren't getting from the translation, it's like a whole world of being opening up of possible meaning. And the sort of tantalizing fact that almost certainly never, ever, ever got to know why that was funny. It's, it's amazing. I mean, it's sort of mind-blowing to think about how jokes and laughter are not actually forever things. Yeah. You know, like they, these are things that like came into the world. And also, even though they're, you know, they, these are things that, like, came into the world. And also, even though the words are not the same derivative, which we looked up at one point, the idea that humor is potentially something uniquely human, that is kind of amazing to me. I don't generally buy into the

whole, like, humans are special. Like, I don't really buy into that in general, you know? But, like, if you tell me humans are special because we can make jokes, then, like, okay. You can get on board. I can get on board with that. I mean, I also love this, but I feel like Sophie's conclusion of, it's like it's next level you had to be there. You know what I mean? Like, you had to be there at that time in order to understand the joke in the way that they meant it. And we're doing that all the time with our sense of humor. Yeah.

And that's frustrating when you're trying to understand something of the past. but it's also kind of... Special. We're... Yeah. Yeah. We're constantly creating little time capsules that will be maybe found and maybe understood or maybe not in the future.

Speaking of which, you guys have told me, you guys keep reminding me that chimps are not monkeys. Yeah. But I haven't told you this thing this whole time, which is that my brother almost adopted a chimp. Whoa. Yeah. What? Whoa. I thought I was going to be a monkey's uncle.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Wow. Amazing. How long have you been holding on to that one? At least three minutes. Endless thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content,

my full repertoire of ape jokes, footage of Amory's laughing, fits join our email list. You can find it at wbUR.org slash endless thread where you can also see pictures and those videos from our Sumerian chimpian adventures. This episode was written, reported, and produced by Dean Russell and co-hosted by me, Amory Severson. And me, Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jenkowski. Our web producer is Kristen Torres. The rest of our team is Nora Sacks, Quincy Walters, Grace Tatter, Megan Cattel, and Paul Vyvarton. We're like us. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and a couple of stinky chimps rolling around in some hay.

Who you call in stinky, Ben? Oh, they're stinky. If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Email Endless Thread at WBUR.org. I almost lost it in the middle of that for absolutely no reason. Typical. Just typical.