I knew it. My dog plays keep-away, and she is grinning all the time. Panting, too. She will NOT play fetch. With her, the game is keep away and laugh at the human. Thirty-two pounds of brown trickster.
I’m not sure I even want to guess what rat humor consists of.
From MSNBC:
”Studies by various groups suggest monkeys, dogs and even rats love a good laugh.”
“When chimps play and chase each other, they pant in a manner that is strikingly like human laughter, Panksepp writes in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Dogs have a similar response.
“Rats chirp while they play, again in a way that resembles our giggles. Panksepp found in a previous study that when rats are playfully tickled, they chirp and bond socially with their human tickler. And they seem to like it, seeking to be tickled more. Apparently joyful rats also preferred to hang out with other chirpers.
"Although no one has investigated the possibility of rat humor, if it exists, it is likely to be heavily laced with slapstick," Panksepp figures. "Even if adult rodents have no well-developed cognitive sense of humor, young rats have a marvelous sense of fun."
So why do we laugh? This tells what MSNBC knew four years ago. I like the fact that laughter can be surpressed, but not initiated consciously, and that it punctuates sentences, it doesn't interrupt them.
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