You gelotologist!

So what happens when a therapist and a hooker spend the night together? In the morning they both say: "120 dollars, please."

Bored scientists came up with quite a handful of researches which emphasize the importance of humor. Is there a humor center in the brain? What are we laughing about? Why do we appreciate humor? Well, let’s spend some funds and see why we are laughing at Seinfeld’s jokes. Yada yada yada.

Medically speaking, Dean K. Shibata, of the University of Rochester Medical Center, claims that the appreciation of jokes and cartoons is related to the ventromedial frontal lobe, an area with little activity in patients with depression and in which lesions may alter the person’s sense of humor. Now, if you are not laughing while watching Tony Blair bashing atheists as the new terrorist threat within, you just could have a ventromedial frontal lobe issue. Or the man could be a plain idiot.

However, researchers know that a number of brain structures, including the prefrontal cortex (responsible for language processing and memory), are involved in humor appreciation. Shibata advised neurosurgeons to avoid such areas of the brain during surgery. We wouldn’t like a healthy humorless patient, would we? What would be the irony if the patient loses his sense of humor when he sees the bill and sues the hospital? After all, this is why the psychiatrists used to administer shock therapy to the patients: to prepare them for the bill. Get it? If you didn’t, not to worry. Genders seem to respond differently when comes to appreciation of humor.

A study made by Allan Reiss, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, discovered that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a "greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, as they used more analytical machinery when deciphering humorous material". So, in case you ever wanted to know what's the difference between a psychologist and a magician here is the answer: a psychologist pulls habits out of rats!  If you laughed at this joke, you might be a man, or a psychologist. Or both.

Now, anatomically speaking, laughter is caused by the epiglottis constricting the larynx and its study is called gelotology. Consequently a person that dedicates his life to studying laughter is called a gelotologist. If he studies laughter in old people that would make him a gerontologist gelotologist. Now, let’s see what we are laughing about. Contrary to popular belief, we do not laugh about humor only; we laugh at people and mainly how they relate. You don’t need a killer punch line to make someone laugh. “Oh, gee, here’s comes Sarah Palin” might as well do. A successful joke thus depends on several factors: gender, level of education, level of a healthy mind (a damaged brain person might not get it), race and age. Apart from relations we also laugh at slapsticks, common experiences and situations, families, marriages, embarrassing situations and slip-ups, work, idiots, bosses, intellectual snobs and psychologists. Oh, in passing, do you know how many psychologists it takes to change a light-bulb? Just one, but the light-bulb has to want to change.

Chic Murray, a Scottish comedian, thinks we also laugh at guns: I drew a gun. He drew a gun. I drew another gun. Soon we were surrounded by lovely drawings of guns. Billy Connolly doesn’t even tell jokes but he does make a lot of physical manifestations on the behavior. And swearing. Bloody hell. On a poll made by E! Television, Seinfeld was the only comedy series that made the ’90s rule. Seinfeld’s humor has a sort of superficial conflict and characters with odd dispositions, but none with deep emotions. A character’s death (architect and marine biologist wannabe George’s fiancée, Susan) got no genuine emotion of regret from anyone in the show. As Wesley Hurd said, in his Postmodernism: a new model of reality, the characters were “thirty-something singles with no roots, vague identities, and conscious indifference to morals” and that made us laugh for almost ten years.

Evolutionary speaking, Robert Provine, professor at the University of Maryland, believes that laughter evolved from the panting behavior of our ancient primate ancestors. “If we tickle chimps or gorillas, they don’t laugh “ha ha ha” but exhibit a panting sound. That’s the sound of ape laughter. And it’s the root of human laughter. When we laugh, we’re often communicating playful intent. So laughter has a bonding function within individuals in a group. It’s often positive, but it can be negative too. There’s a difference between “laughing with” and “laughing at.” People who laugh at others may be trying to force them to conform or casting them out of the group.”

However, the effectiveness of humor as a communication device remains uncertain as humor has proven to be very elusive, although the attention-attracting ability of humor has also been demonstrated in education research (Powell and Andresen 1985; Zillmann et al. 1980).

Sigmund Freud believed that laughter releases tension and "psychic energy" and it’s basically a coping mechanism and maybe this is why the psychoanalysis is a lot quicker for a man than for a woman. Because when it's time to go back to childhood, a man is already there.

More recent studies claimed that men make women laugh as they want to get them in bed. A laughing woman opens her mouth, exposes her teeth and throat, makes the “hahahaha” sounds, tilts her head back and that by itself is foreplay. But, while women appear to prefer a man who makes them laugh (82% of women consistently rank humor as one of the top 3 qualities of men they want to date) the same does not hold true when the sexes are reversed - and men are not more attracted to funny girls. Humor is a quality that gets women in bed, and which seems to only be appreciated by women, required in men. So yes, it is a no brainer that laughter leads to sex, unless of course the laughter is about sex, at which point the laughter ensures that there will be no more sex. After all, what does a behaviorist tell to another after lovemaking: “Darling, that was wonderful for you. How was it for me?"