Short spoken excerpt (SPEAKER A) from a YouTube video titled "How Laughter Connects Us #Psychology #happiness" by Dr. Arthur Brooks. The speaker argues that observational humor depends on common knowledge and that laughter makes private knowledge common: because laughter is loud, staccato, and interrupts speech, it signals that others "get" the joke and thereby creates mutual awareness and social bonding.
Are comedians that use observational humor, relying very, very largely on common knowledge. Yes. So what the laughter does is it makes private knowledge common. It's suited to do that because laughter is unignorable. It's loud, it's staccato. It also gets in the way of speaking. You can't talk and laugh at the same time. You alternate. And so you know when everyone is laughing, then everyone is aware of something, including the person who just said what makes Evelyn laugh. What that does is it establishes that something that each one of us may know, private people get the joke. What they are acknowledging with their laughter is that they knew it all along, and now everyone knows that everyone else knows it.
