Robert Provine, an Authority on Laughter, Is Dead at 76

He decided to study laughter instead, taking his methods out into the world and, through a series of studies and popular books, helping to create the modern science of humor.

“My approach to understanding laughter is one that a visiting extraterrestrial might take,” he wrote later. “What would the visitor make of the large bipedal animals emitting paroxysms of sound from a toothy vent in their faces?”

Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, died at 76 on Oct. 17 in a hospital in Baltimore. His wife, Helen Weems, said the cause was complications of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

Provine made his career pivot in 1990, at a time when theories explaining laughter’s purpose were still not fully formed. People laughed for a variety of reasons, it was thought: in response to the folly of others, as an expression of superiority; to release aggressive or sexual tension; or to register upended expectations — say, ordering a “small” cola and receiving a supersize half-gallon cup.

Provine dug in, measuring the different sounds of laughter, its varying cadences and loudness, its presence in primates. (Chimpanzees laugh, too.) He and a team of graduate students lurked for hours with their notebooks at shopping malls, student unions and other public spaces, recording and evaluating some 1,200 pre-laughter comments.

They found that, contrary to common wisdom, laughter is rarely a response to jokes, stories or a prank. “Most of the laughter seemed to follow rather banal remarks, such as ‘Look, it’s Andre,’ ‘Are you sure?’ and ‘It was nice meeting you, too,’” Provine wrote, in a 1996 issue of American Scientist. “Even our greatest hits, the funniest of the 1,200 pre-laugh comments, were not necessarily howlers: ‘You don’t have to drink, just buy us drinks’; ‘She’s got a sex disorder — she doesn’t like sex’; and ‘Do you date within your species?’”

Weems said her husband had called this work “sidewalk neuroscience,” a low-budget but rigorous exercise that was immediately relevant to people’s daily lives “He believed strongly that the lay person, the taxpayer, should be able to get something out of the work, and he was devoted to popular media, to getting the word out.”

He did just that in a 2000 book, “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation,” which spelled out a broader theory of laughter’s function — as a social signal that bonds people and sets the tone for group gatherings. Laughter, of the derisive kind, can also be a means of excluding people, Provine found. It wasn’t long before he was articulating his findings on public radio in the United States and Canada and in the The Washington Post.

Provine extended his study of such “nonverbal vocalizations” well beyond laughter. In 2012 he published “Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond.” He argued, for instance, that yawning not only indicated sleepiness but could also signal social empathy with others who are yawning.

“Although it is ubiquitous, and something that if you’re lucky you do every day, laughter is truly a puzzling phenomenon” said Peter McGraw, director of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-author of “The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny.” “His book, ‘Laughter,’ is really a go-to source in this field, and one reason is that he studied laughter out in the real world, not in the lab.”

Rod Martin, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario said, by email: “Bob Provine’s main contribution to the field of research in the psychology of humor was to draw attention to laughter as a phenomenon of interest in itself. Until then, humor researchers had mainly seen laughter as an outward expression of the inner experience of humor.”

Robert Raymond Provine was born May 11, 1943, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the first of two sons of Robert William Provine, a chemist for Sun Oil, and Thelma Fern (Morgan) Provine, a homemaker. His younger brother, William, died when he was a teenager.

Robert attended Thomas Edison Preparatory School in Tulsa, then entered Oklahoma State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1965. He completed a Ph.D. in the same subject in 1971, at Washington University, in St. Louis. He worked there as a research assistant until 1974, when he moved to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He spent the rest of his career there and, by all accounts, embodied the figure of a laughter researcher: a bearded, congenial, wisecracking presence whose own humor could straighten the spine at its wicked best.

Provine’s first marriage, to Helen Vona, who was known as Vivi, in 1967, ended in divorce in 1990. He married Weems in 1996. In addition to her, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Kimberly Lourenco and Robert W. Provine; and three grandchildren.

In the same American Scientist article, Provine wrote that the science of laughter was still far from worked out. “All of us have encountered people with bizarre-sounding laughter,” he wrote. “Do these odd types of laughter run in families? If so, what is the nature of its development and heritability?

“In my otherwise forgettable high-school physics class,” he continued, “there was a kid who brayed like a donkey when he laughed. Where is Roger now that I need him?”

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