Babies laugh before they can learn, and every society has humour

The argument

This argument rests on two observations proponents take to be decisive. The first is that laughter arrives very early. Infants laugh in their first months, well before they have language, before they can have absorbed any conventions about what is appropriately funny, and in response to things no one taught them to find amusing — a sudden reappearance, an unexpected sound, a familiar face doing something wrong. Whatever is producing that laughter was not instructed. The second is universality. There is no known human society without humour. Every culture jokes, teases and laughs, and laughter itself is recognisable across societies that share no language and no comic tradition. Proponents argue that this pattern is what inherited traits look like: present everywhere, appearing on schedule in development, and not requiring transmission to show up. Conventions, by contrast, are patchy — some cultures have writing or chess and others do not — and humour is not patchy at all. Proponents accept that the content of jokes varies, and argue the objection misses the claim. What varies is the material; what is universal is the capacity and the disposition to use it. A sense of humour on this view is the equipment that makes anything funny in the first place: a readiness to be delighted by incongruity, by reversal, by the gap between what was expected and what occurred. That equipment must already be in place for cultural material to be funny to anyone, which is why it can be present in an infant who has learned nothing yet. Because laughter precedes learning and appears in every human society, this argument concludes, a sense of humour is innate.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who hold humour to be learned reply that infant laughter at surprise and physical incongruity is not yet a sense of humour, and that the appreciation of wordplay, irony and the deadpan arrives only as the understanding each requires is acquired. Universality, they argue, shows at most a general capacity, as with language: every society has speech, yet no one is born speaking, and fluency is entirely a product of immersion. The capacity is not the sense of humour.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Infant laughter is a response to tickling, surprise and play, and the premise needs it to be the same capacity as a sense of humour. That the early response is untaught does not establish that what develops out of it is not learned. [Rejecting P2] Universality is consistent with inheritance and equally with any practice that arises wherever people live together, as cooking, music and storytelling do. The premise treats universality as decisive when it does not discriminate between the two explanations. [Rejecting P3] The inference holds only if the universal trait and the varying one are the same thing. The conclusion itself concedes that what a culture finds funny varies, which is what a question about someone's sense of humour is usually asking about.