Do Apes Have a Sense of Humor?
Something funny is going on with our closest relatives – chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas. Like humans, our cousins seem to revel in comedy – slapstick mainly, but comedy nonetheless. The Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior is looking into the fun.
“Great apes are excellent candidates for playful teasing, as they are closely related to us, engage in social play, show laughter and display relatively sophisticated understandings of others’ expectations,” says researcher Isabelle Laumer.
The playful teasing is similar to what is observed in human babies, even before they can speak: repetitive provocations like playfully offering and withdrawing objects, violating social rules, and disrupting others’ activities. Being little jerks, in other words, but it’s usually pretty funny. The researchers identified 18 distinct teasing behaviors that looked like intentional provocations to get a rise out of a hapless group victim. “It was common for teasers to repeatedly wave or swing a body part or object in the middle of the target’s field of vision, hit or poke them, stare closely at their face, disrupt their movements, pull on their hair or perform other behaviors that were extremely difficult for the target to ignore,” explains UCLA professor Erica Cartmill, senior author of the study.
The researchers note that Jane Goodall and other primatologists in the field had observed similar shenanigans in chimps, but this new study examines the phenomenon systematically. The point of the wacky research is to explore whether rudimentary jokes were present in our last common ancestor, some 13 million years ago, which might help explain how humor evolved in all of us.
Explains Laumer: “We also hope that this study raises awareness of the similarities we share with our closest relatives and the importance of protecting these endangered animals.”
This short video documents a few of the ape forays into comedy.
BOS Foundation BPI
Photo credit: Max Block / Max Planck Institute
