CMC 2018: Report – The Art of Laughter & The Art of Meaning Making
This one-hour session was broken down in to two distinct halves. Part One: The Art of Laughter Writer, comedian and children’s performer Howard Read spent the opening minutes making jokes and playing games to elicit laughter from the audience, in order to later analyse why his efforts did or didn’t succeed. Professor Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London then took to the lectern to discuss the (surprisingly little) research in to laughter and its meaning to humans. Ask an adult about laughter and they will tend to think of jokes, but Scott says it is in fact fundamentally about communication and a social activity. We are thirteen times more likely to laugh if we are with people. In…
