Monkeying around

If you’re the proud owner of a dog or cat, you might get the distinct impression that your pet has a sense of humour. They don’t literally tell jokes, of course, but many species of animal seem to excel at other behaviours we might qualify as humorous: appearing to tease or mock their targets, or make them the subject of practical jokes. Meanwhile, some researchers claim that apes using sign language have broken the language barrier, while parrots and other birds are able to actually sound the words.

There is debate around the degree to which these behaviours can be compared to the human understanding of humour, or to our conscious efforts to be funny. But if humour is part of what makes us human, what would sharing this attribute mean for our relationship with other animal species?

Humans have noticed animals playing tricks for generations. A classic account by the 20th-century German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler describes a chimpanzee teasing hens with bread. The chimp would hold a slice of bread between the meshes of wire and wait until a hen approached. Then, before it could get a peck in, he would pull the bread back at the last moment. Köhler records that the chimp was clearly enjoying himself, repeating the trick many times. Such activities seem to show that apes are capable of “reading the mind” of another creature, in the sense that they display awareness of two opposed views of the world: their own and that of the unfortunate hen.

The balancing of two or multiple perspectives is a minimum requirement for telling a joke. We also need a certain level of social wherewithal if we don’t want to accidentally insult or rile our audience. This is also true in the animal kingdom, according to recent research into the social lives of the great apes, published in The Royal Society’s biological research journal in February 2024. While observing four different species of apes, the researchers found that the joshing generally starts when the animals are relaxed. (We might think of humans bantering in a pub.) When the group is sufficiently de-stressed, one of their members – usually a young ape, but not always – tends to look for an adult target. Then they pounce, pulling hair, poking ribs and generally indulging in a bit of edgy jesting.

But for teasing to be playful rather than aggressive, the teaser, to some extent, has to understand the recipient’s expectations and predict their likely reaction. The researchers found that the antagonist ape would, at a certain point, turn tail and make a brief run for it – before pausing to look back at the target. The researchers called it “response looking”. Comedians call it “waiting for a laugh”. The study deconstructed the process of playful teasing as “attention-getting, one-sidedness, response looking, repetition and elaboration/escalation”. When an animal is teasing, it typically looks at the target’s face either during or immediately after the tease. If the target shows minimal or no response, the action is typically repeated. The teaser also often adopts a “play face” – much like the “I want to eat you!” scowl beloved of human infants.

The anatomy of a joke

Yet if animals enjoy physical humour, what about tickling? It turns out that quite a few animals – even mammals only distantly related to us, such as rats – seem to laugh when you tickle them. As early as the 19th century Charles Darwin had described the phenomenon, writing of a zoo keeper tickling a young chimpanzee: “… the armpits are particularly sensitive to tickling, as in the case of our children – a more decided chuckling or laughing sound is uttered.” Apparently, humans have been tickling animals for generations. But it seems to be only the great apes who actually tickle each other (and perhaps some species of monkey, although arguments diverge over this).

We often say that jokes “tickle” us more generally, in the same way as when the soles of our feet are being attacked with a feather. Whether it is a witty aside or a slapstick performance, our laughter is, in part, a spontaneous and unwilled reaction. Otherwise it is forced, or fake, laughter. But spontaneous laughter can get us in trouble. An uncomfortable conflict occurs if we laugh at a politically incorrect joke, or at someone else’s misfortune – watching someone slip on a banana skin being the standard example.

So what is it that “tickles” us mentally? There are three general theories as to the function of jokes and wit, as I set out in my new book, The Ah-Ha Moment. There’s Plato’s claim that it is about feelings of superiority; there’s Henri Bergson and Arthur Schopenhauer’s idea that it’s all about pleasure in observing incongruity; and finally there’s the idea that jokes are a form of “benign violation”. Making mischief, in other words.

First, let’s look at the French philosopher Henri Bergson. His account of humour, “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic”, made him a cult figure in the early 20th century. A contemporary of Sigmund Freud, he probably inspired Freud’s own study, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious”, although the founder of psychoanalysis – far more famous than Bergson today – was diligent in hiding his borrowings. Both men saw humour as something distinctively human and also, at times, aggressive: “an unavowed intention to humiliate”.

However, many jokes don’t involve the act of belittling, whether subconscious or not. Take your standard inoffensive dad joke, or Christmas cracker pun. What do you call a sheep who can sing and dance? Lady Bah Bah. But a lot of humour seems predicated on some element of discomfort. Many comic set-ups involve scenarios that seem to be threatening us, while also being essentially safe. We might think of the kind of japes that went on in a show like Noel’s House Party: guns that fire water or glitter, or buckets filled with slime – which, while disgusting, is not actually harmful. Benign violation might also involve word-play, such as the quip to an anxious friend, “Don’t worry, after you’ve been to the dentist a few times you start to know the drill.”

The idea of benign violation attempts to formulate this dynamic and was first proposed by Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren at the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2010. Humour, they proposed, occurs when three conditions are satisfied: (1) a situation is a violation, (2) the situation is benign, and (3) both perceptions occur simultaneously.

McGraw and Warren believe that this idea of humour crosses the human-animal divide. In fact, they have proposed that a “sense of humour” is an evolutionary necessity for any animal that lives in a social group. For example, wolves live in hierarchal packs where it’s essential for each animal to know its place. Wolves may defuse what we might call uncomfortable situations by wagging their tails, or indicate they are only playing by performing a “play bow” (the rear goes up and the front of the chest is brought to the ground).

Laughing dogs and squeaking rats

But what about laughter? Are these animal forms of submissive behaviour akin to the nervous laughter of humans? In 1949, Man Meets Dog was published by Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel Prize winner regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, or the study of animals. In the book, he suggests that dogs not only understand human laughter, but have their own way of laughing, too: a huffing, breathy “laugh pant”. Lorenz goes on: “… the slightly opened jaws, which reveal the tongue, and the tilted angle of the mouth, which stretches almost from ear to ear, give a still stronger impression of laughter.”

In the early 2000s Patricia Simonet, a researcher at an animal shelter in Washington, seemed to add more evidence to this theory. She was looking specifically into the laughing sounds of dogs, which involved a lot of standing in parks with a parabolic microphone, recording the sound of dogs playing. Simonet and her team seemed to confirm that dogs do have a very specific “play pant”.

Her boss at the shelter, Nancy Hill, was doubtful, so they tested it out. When they played the sound of a dog panting in the ordinary sense over the loudspeaker, the dogs in the shelter kept right on barking. But when they played the dog version of “laughing”, all 15 barking dogs went quiet within about a minute. “It was a night-and-day difference,” Hill said. “It was absolutely phenomenal.” Simonet and others went on to present a paper to the 2005 International Conference on Environmental Enrichment suggesting that dog laughter might be employed in animal shelters to reduce stress levels and encourage positive social behaviour.

What about other species? As part of an ongoing academic debate over the nature of ultrasonic squeaks made by rats, researchers Jaak Panksepp and Jeff Burgdorf found that the animals made many more of these squeaks – which they identified as “laughter sounds” – in the context of rough-and-tumble social play. In fact, when primatologist Sasha Winkler and UCLA professor of communication Greg Bryant conducted a literature review, in a paper for the journal Bioacoustics in 2021, they found reports of animal laughter in at least 65 species. The list includes not only a variety of the usual primates and domestic dogs, but also foxes, seals, cows and mongooses, as well as several types of birds, including parakeets and Australian magpies. In 2009, a paper in the journal Current Biology by M. D. Ross and colleagues concluded that there was “strong evidence” that tickle-induced animal laughter really was the same kind of thing as human laughter – or, as they put it, that there was a “phylogenetic continuity from nonhuman displays to human emotional expressions”.

Cosmo, Koko and other controversial cases

Telling jokes is a step too far, though, right? It involves language, and animals can’t speak. Not so fast. There is a controversial debate over whether animals are able to speak, or only to mimic human language. The loving owners of parrots are often convinced of the former. Take Betty Jean Craige, sometime director at the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia in the US. Craige insists that her African Grey parrot is able to talk independently. “Cosmo and I chat constantly,” Craige says. “She asks me, ‘Where Betty Jean gonna go?’ And she tells me what she wants to do: ‘Cosmo wanna go in a car, please?’ or ‘Cosmo wanna stay home.’ When I’m out of sight, I hear her mutter to herself, ‘Cosmo wanna shower,’ as she heads toward the dogs’ water bowl for a bath.” The parrot is a YouTube star and the subject of Craige’s 2010 book Conversations with Cosmo.

He’s not the only African Grey to receive such attention. In the 1990s and 2000s, Irene Pepperberg, a researcher at Arizona and Harvard universities, claimed that her parrot Alex could not only speak and do basic arithmetic, but also understand analogies. Unlike Craige, she studied Alex under lab conditions. Alex knew 150 English words, she claimed, which he used sometimes to chastise other birds in the lab telling them, “You’re wrong!” and “Speak clearly!” He even combined words when presented with an object he’d never seen before, for example, calling a slice of birthday cake “yummy bread”. The Dutch-American primatologist and ethologist Frans De Waal was suitably convinced, writing that “Alex systematically destroyed the notion … that all birds can do is mimic human language … Our notion of what a bird is has forever been changed.”

Birds can seem quite alien to us. Humans are much closer to the great apes, with whom we share 96 per cent of our genes. So it is no surprise that perhaps the most controversial story of an animal appearing to learn how to use humour involves a gorilla. Koko was born in San Francisco Zoo, then cross-fostered by researcher Francine Patterson, who eventually obtained custody of her and went on to set up the Gorilla Foundation. Researchers at the foundation claimed to have taught Koko more than 2,000 words through sign language. Like Alex with “yummy bread”, they recorded that she soon started to play with words. For instance, Koko signed “white tiger” for a zebra, and “eye hat” for a mask. Once, when she had been drinking water through a thick rubber straw – after repeatedly asking for juice and not receiving it – she referred to herself as a “sad elephant”.

The team credited Koko with telling jokes, citing her ability to play with words and understand metaphor. They also noticed that she often chuckled at the result of her own or her companions’ discrepant or mischievous actions – for example after watching a research assistant accidentally sit down on a sandwich, and in response to another pretending to feed sweets to a toy alligator.

After appearing in two National Geographic cover stories, Koko became the most famous representative of her critically endangered species. However, the extent to which Koko really used language and humour is disputed, and many scientists today consider the researchers’ findings about her abilities to be invalid. In an influential 1979 book, Herbert Terrace, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, argued that all Koko – and other subjects of animal language experiments – were really doing was mimicking their trainers, who then over-interpreted the signals.

Anthropomorphism?

All research comparing jokes and laughter in humans with the behaviour of other animals risks the criticism of being unjustified anthropomorphism. Many scholars still insist that the laughter of apes, dogs and rats is better termed something neutral, such as panting or squeaking. Others have grudgingly spoken of “laugh-like” behaviour.

But – setting aside the specific controversies around animal language experiments – why should we be so surprised that other species might understand and practice their own varieties of teasing, jokes and banter, and respond to them in similar ways? The refusal to allow animals a sense of humour may reflect a greater bias, the one the French philosopher Descartes encapsulated when he compared the screaming in pain of animals to the mere squeaking of wheels in machines.

Darwin’s perspective seems wiser, proposing that if related species show similar behaviour under similar circumstances, then it should be assumed that the underlying psychology is similar, too. This principle guides us to both see and value the similarities between us and our animal companions on Earth. The trajectory of research clearly suggests that animals have more of a sense of humour than has been, until recently, appreciated. Perhaps this should lead us to treat other animal species with more respect, or even to start counting some of them as worthy of personhood. No joke!

This article is from New Humanist’s Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.