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The Times
Wednesday, 28 April 2004
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The Times - Hugo Rifkind 28.4.04

The nature of laughter, and why we do it, is a serious business.

INITIALLY people thought that Nicola Green was a lunatic, she says. “Or trying to make money. Or something to do with Dom Joly. But then one person started laughing, and soon everybody else did. They stopped caring that it was Monday morning and they were on the Tube. I think laughing is the only time we can lose that self-consciousness. Well. Except for orgasm.”

Thankfully, at least for the people she meets on the Northern Line, it is only laughter that Green is after. Armed with a tape recorder and, frequently, a huge, yellow tasselled umbrella, she has spent more than six months marching up to strangers and demanding it. Invariably, she gets it.

The fruits of her labour have been made into a Radio 4 show, Laugh Out Loud, interspersed with contributions from Paul Merton, Arthur Smith, Emma Freud, Ainsley Harriot and others, all musing on how they have laughed, and when. Although not, please note, why. Laugh Out Loud is about the act of laughter itself, which the comedian Arthur Smith describes to me, rather charmingly, as “really just a noise, like a belch or a fart”. It isn’t about comedy.

Analysing humour is a painful business, and about as funny as astrophysics. But when you talk about laughter, you laugh. It is like yawning when you are being yawned at. It is unavoidable.

Green is a portrait artist and, when equipped with brush and easel, prefers to concentrate on such areas as the feet or the back — finding bits of the body that, as she puts it, “show the personality beyond the mask of the face”.

With Laugh Out Loud her aim was something similar. “Everybody has a different laugh,” she points out. Later, Arthur Smith reminds me that everybody also has a different sneeze, and probably makes a different rasping sound when they vomit. This is not an issue I raise with Nicola, although I think she would laugh if I did.

Especially interesting to Nicola are people who laugh when they are not supposed to. “We seem to have separated laughter from so much of our lives,” she says. Helped by her yellow umbrella, she has recorded laughter in dentists’ offices, banks and hospitals, and targeted policemen and traffic wardens.

One of her first targets was a soldier, on duty at Horse Guards Parade. “His nose went first,” she recalls, “then his ears, then his shoulders started to heave.”

Nicola has not yet done a church service, but she is planning to. With the yellow umbrella? “Why not? Our society has demarcated laughing times, and it’s something that we’re surprisingly rigid about.”

It was not ever thus. The jovial Mark Oakley, Rector of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, tells me that while modern Christianity tends to be giggle-free, things were different in medieval times. “We know that in Bavaria the priest would get up on Easter Day in the morning and do what was almost a Carry On routine,” he says. “He’d tell smutty jokes, to get the community laughing. It’s alien to our way of thinking today, but there is something of the Resurrection about laughter. They’d do something similar at Pentecost, when water would be poured down from the rafters to drench the congregation while they simultaneously lowered a wooden dove.”

This might be reminiscent of Vic Reeves, but one can almost understand the kind of disjointed rapture those Bavarians were driving at. Strangely, it seems close to Green’s comments about orgasms. Although this is not, obviously, an issue that I raise with the Reverend.

It is because laughter can make us so helpless, and potentially vulnerable, Green believes, that different cultures deal with it in different ways.

“Think of the difference between a Japanese schoolgirl, giggling with her hand over her mouth, and the deep belly laugh of a woman in Africa,” she says.

“Doesn’t that tell you a huge amount about both of them? When you see somebody laugh, they are revealing something about themselves that they wouldn’t otherwise reveal. Some cultures revel in that and some, I think including our own, can find it awkward.”

Green also recorded the laughter of a Year 10 English class at Hornsey School for Girls in Haringey, which is largely made up of Indian, Afro-Caribbean and Bangladeshi pupils. Sabrina Broadbent, their teacher, says that when her girls laugh, it often has little to do with humour. “It’s often more of an identity, a group thing,” she says. “I see it as a way of filling up the space in your head, like boys kicking around a football.”

Ah yes, the cackle of a mob of teenage girls. Was there ever a sound more terrifying? But girls are not the only people to use laughter in attack, even if they might be the best at it. Oakley concedes that most of the laughter in the Old Testament is basically God laughing at his vanquished foes, and Green was keen to get up on stage at last year’s anti-war rally in Hyde Park, with umbrella, to record the laughter of the crowd.

“Imagine that,” she says. “A quarter of a million people laughing at Bush and Blair. Like chimps baring their teeth.”

Of course, one problem with demanding laughter in order to record it is that the laughter one gets is likely to be counterfeit. What about the dismissive ha-ha, or the cynical snigger? What about Broadbent’s pupils, pretending to laugh when they aren’t amused at all? Green welcomes them all. “I’m not sure there is really any such thing as fake laughter,” she says.

“Even if it is snide or deliberate, it is always communicating something. We don’t have to be amused, but we are always sending out a signal. Maybe it’s that we get the joke, or maybe it’s that we are rising above it. Maybe it’s that we are coping and we are not too sad. It’s pre-language communication.”

Could this be why babies and young children seem to laugh in a way that the rest of us cannot? “It only takes a loud noise to get kids laughing,” says the comedian Mark Steel. “A fart or a burp, or even just a bang. My lad will laugh at anything. When you’re a comic, it’s fantastic having a kid who’s 7.”

Emma Freud agrees. The television presenter, comic writer and wife of the scriptwriter Richard Curtis recorded the first time her baby son Spike laughed at the age of eight weeks. “We were in the kitchen,” she says. “I stuck my finger into his ribs and off he went.”

Does she think that we lose that kind of shameless glee as we get older? “Absolutely. My husband and I were reading something the other day about how we laugh less the older we get. It was something like, you laugh 53 times a day when you’re a year old, and only half that much by the time you are 9. By the time you get to our age ... well. Richard reckons that he hasn’t laughed properly since 1982.”

A baby’s laughter, of course, has little to do with what we would normally understand as humour. But, as Green’s programme shows, perhaps the same could be said for most laughter.

Perhaps our laugh is best regarded like a dog’s bark or a duck’s quack — simply the noise that we, as creatures, invariably make. It’s a funny idea. Although not “funny ha-ha”, obviously.

Laugh Out Loud, Radio 4, Monday 3 May 2004 8.30pm

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