A ticklish subject

I’ve been doing some research on Humor recently.  Weighty tomes with nearly incomprehensible charts and graphs and jargon tackle the subject from every conceivable direction. Example from the International Journal of Humor Research: A multi-national study involving 73 countries on Disparagement Humor: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Psychoanalyic Superiority, and Social Identity Theories. Let me assure you these articles are entirely humorless (category of humor: irony).

One of the many sub-catagories of humor is tickling. And in case you think tickling is a trifling subject, some of history’s greatest thinkers have pondered the mysteries of the tickle response, including Plato, Francis Bacon, Galileo and Darwin.

In Laughter, A Scientific Investigation, a weighty chapter is devoted to tickling. After reading many pages of mind–numbing descriptions of tickling studies there and elsewhere, I am now able to share with you the following:

1. Tickling is an important evolutionary step on the way to speech development according to Paleohumorologists. (Seriously, Paleohumorologists?) Apparently laughing started out as breathy panting by primates, often caused by tickling. Please– go to the zoo. Observe the Chimpanzees.

2. As everybody knows you can’t tickle yourself because “your cerebellum governs your movement and can predict when you’re about to tickle yourself. You can, however, simulate a light tickle (called knismesis) rather than the full-on laughter including heavy tickle (the gargalesis).”

3. There is a category of porn similar to S and M devoted to tickling. (I skipped visits to those porn pages.)

4.  Scientists actually invented and use a tickle machine on their study subjects to test various tickle theses. One such device is a shoe with ticklers built in. Some therapists use these tickle shoes on depressed patients!

5. Forced tickling is a form of abuse or bullying which is so common there’s a term for it: “tickle torture.” That one I know about because my mean older brother used to hold me down and tickle me until it literally hurt.  All my pleas for mercy met with his sinister laughter.

6.  Rats like to be tickled but their giggling is in such a high-pitched realm that humans need sonar devices (or something like that) to hear it. The rats need to be in a positive state of mind for the tickling to induce laughter. However, how their states of mind were measured was, sadly, not described.

7. People over forty don’t tickle or get tickled nearly as much as those under forty. I hope a lot of money wasn’t spent on researching that one.

My exhaustive humor research has lead to lots of “you’ve got to be kidding me!” chuckles and guffaws. And I’m happy to report that I don’t suffer from gelotophobia, the fear of laughter.

Photo by Arina Krasnikova. Creative Commons