Something I’ve always wondered, and I’m sure we all have, is…why are we ticklish? And to make things more complicated, why do we laugh?

What makes the subject of laughter so mind-baffling is that it seems to be instinctive. Despite having hundreds of different cultures and languages around the world, we all still laugh the same. Babies even laugh before they can talk! Why is this? Is it in human nature? Is it a method of communication? Well…no. One thing I’ve learned in researching for this blog is that people actually study these kinds of things (and humor in its entirety). They’re called gelotologists and they’ve found several different theories explaining these occurrences. You can research them if you’d like…but for the purposes of this blog, we’ll talk about one… the “Incongruity Theory of Humor”.

What this basically says is that we laugh when things surprise us. All jokes seem to start out in such a way that we think we can predict how they’ll end. However, most of them leave us in a stupor because we didn’t expect the outcome, or punch-line, and our reaction is laughter. The start was incongruent, or incompatible, with the ending.

To add to this, every time we are humored, we learn something, which explains why things aren’t usually funny a second time around…because we’ve already learned it (like that fact that “lol” looks like a drowning man flailing his arms in the air).

We all laugh when tickled because it’s also unexpected and creates a tingling sensation in the areas where we are “ticklish”. These areas also seem to be the same on most of us. This is because we are ticklish in our most vulnerable areas, therefore, we feel sensations as a defense mechanism (we learn this as children. This also explains why we cannot tickle ourselves, because we see it coming…it’s expected.

I hope you enjoyed! Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddV6jyDeCKA