Mocked

Written by Patricia Garay

What separates a chortle from a snicker is your history. Your culture, your experiences, and your unique personality inform whether you interpret the little laugh as benign or mocking. Mocking, or ridicule, has always been one of laughter’s facets across eras and cultures. Such cruel laughter is embedded in human folklore: in the Greek myth the goddess Demeter was searching for her kidnapped daughter, Persephone. When she collapsed exhausted at the edge of a town and was offered a flask of barley-water to drink, she seized the flask and chugged it down. As she drank, she heard a local boy, Ascalabus, laughing at the sight of the goddess gulping greedily. Her inner turmoil sharpened into the need for revenge, and Demeter wiped her mouth and turned Ascalabus into a lizard.¹ 

Perhaps Demeter judged correctly that Ascalabus was a disrespectful kid who needed a violent dose of humility. However, Demeter—anguished at the loss of her daughter, traumatized by the time she was swallowed by her own father Kronos—might have added some of her own baggage and insecurity to her perception of a relatively innocent laugh simply because innocent laughs are often interpreted as mocking. In a study back in 2009, scientists played audio recordings of “joyful” or “ticklish” laughter to listeners and asked the listeners to identify the motive behind the recorded amusement. Joyful laughter was interpreted by listeners as examples of someone “laughing at someone else’s misfortune” or “taunting laughter” nearly as often as it was interpreted as “joyful” or “ticklish”. To extrapolate the numbers in this study, if you laugh your joyful laugh to a group of eight people, four of them would find it joyful, three of them would perceive it as you “laughing at someone’s misfortune”, and one would find your laugh outright taunting!² 

To understand why we are so different in how we hear mocking laughter—and why in some rare cases, people hear laughter only as mocking—we have to look at our culture and our personal history, and this starts long, long ago, as little babies, when we were being mocked for the greater good – a twisted version of it.

Molded by Laughter

If we all had the powers of Demeter to exact revenge, we’d all have been turned into lizards by kindergarten. Mocking laughter affects us profoundly, starting when we are very young. Researchers have observed signs of embarrassment in babies as young as two years old.³ No published studies have yet examined babies’ recognition of mocking laughter, but non-academic knowledge provides a hint. According to a Sámi weaning custom in Swedish Lapland:

[A] mother suckles her child as a rule until ‘it can understand when it is being laughed at.’ For the other children tease it if it is still drinking at the breast when it can walk.⁴

Since children start to walk before two years old, this custom corroborates the idea that as toddlers we start to comprehend that laughter is not only an expression of love and joy, but a judgment about us. Some judgment has a social purpose. In the case of the breastfeeding baby, mockery inspires the baby to trade the comfort of its mother for independence. Adults often are aware of the power of laughter or ridicule to shape a child’s behavior. For example, the following is taken from a 1969 interview with a Western Apache man: 

Laugh at a child when he does something bad. Make fun of him and say, “Don’t you know any better than to do that? Other people don’t do such things.” That is the way to prevent him from doing it again; to teach him what is wrong and what is right.⁵

Mocking laughter, then, teaches social norms by making the individual being laughed at “ashamed of what he has done”.⁵ What our society or culture laughs at shapes who we become. 

When Laughter Misshapes Us

While mocking laughter might teach children to behave, stay safe, and learn manners, it can teach us to change who we are in ways that are more harmful than beneficial. An interview from the 1990s with a Spanish-speaking Mexican-American man demonstrates how our personalities can be shaped by mocking laughter. 

I remember in the fifth grade studying Spanish and when we had to do class conversations out loud it was always traumatic for me. Most of the kids in my class were Anglo, so when I spoke Spanish I was careful not to have an accent, so I would not be laughed at. Perhaps I should have showed more will-power, but it’s awfully damned hard when even the teacher snickers. This kind of experience gave me a shyness I have never been able to get rid of. Instead of mastering the language, it was, instead, taken away from me and replaced by the knowledge that Columbus discovered America and that Indians were savages.⁶

In this classroom, speaking Spanish with a perfect accent in a Spanish class was outside of the local norms, and was laughable. The boy not only shaped his behavior accordingly in class, but the effect of this lived on into adulthood. This sort of experience, whether called bullying, racial trauma, or social exclusion, is known to be associated with certain types of social phobias: fear of speaking up, or fear of talking with new people. And in rarer cases, situations like this appear to lead to a condition called gelotophobia. 

In 1995 a German psychologist, Michael Titze, described a set of patients who constantly interpreted laughter as having a mocking intent.⁷ These patients physically froze up—“like [the wooden puppet] Pinocchio”— upon hearing laughter. Titze named this fear of laughter “gelotophobia,” from the minor Greek god of laughter Gelos, a merry friend of Dionysus.⁸ A few years later a pair of Swiss scientists, Ruch and Proyer, wrote a fifteen-point questionnaire, called the GELOPH-15, that captured some of the traits of their own clients who had similar responses to laughter.⁹ The GELOPH-15 used a rating scale of strongly disagree (1), moderately disagree (2), moderately agree (3), and strongly agree (4). Take a look at the questions and find your average to see how you score. 

In the original study introducing the GELOPH-15 test, gelotophobia appeared rare, at least in the group of Swiss and German university students that Ruch surveyed: only 6% scored as displaying slight gelotophobia and no one scored higher.¹¹ Given that roughly 25% of school children in Germany report being bullied,¹² it’s clear that many people can experience bullying without developing gelotophobia. Alternatively, it is possible that gelotophobes may be less likely to attend universities to avoid being excluded from their high social demands. Gelotophobia has been found at much higher rates (up to 45%) in people with autism spectrum disorders, eating disorders, psychiatric conditions, and a history of being over- or under- weight.^{11, 13, 14} In these cases, the fear of laughter appears to be correlated with a childhood of teasing and high levels of distress.¹⁰ Frequency of teasing is not as correlated with the harshness of teasing, so if your elementary school days were full of mildly hurtful teasing you might not experience high gelotophoba scores, but a year of miserable teasing could cause a lasting effect.

Even though the GELOPH-15 test was designed within the context of Western cultures, the statements have been tested in cultures around the world (though mostly in University settings). In an expansive study, people across 73 countries filled out translated GELOPH-15 questionnaires.¹⁵ There were enormous differences between countries for each of the questions. For example, only 8% of Finnish respondents, but 80% of Thai respondents agreed with “When others laugh in my presence I get suspicious.” This suggests an incredible distinction in the interpretation of laughter across cultures, though humor and joyful laughter is found abundantly across the world. Is laughter used more often as a rebuke in Thai culture? Are people taught to value their respectability to a greater extent? Are they taught to think carefully of others’ opinions of them? While some differences in scores may be due to subtleties in translation, across all questions, individuals from Asian countries had the highest scores and those from Western countries the lowest. Cruelty, ridicule, and exclusion are universal: but it is interesting to wonder how the Spanish-speaking boy would fare in a country with higher overall GELOPH-15 scores than the US. In a community where everyone is taught of laughter’s mocking power, and of the demand to self-assess, then laughter will be treated more carefully, as the weapon it is. However, in a community where laughter is less likely to be seen as a potent tool of shame—then mocking laughter might reign unchecked in his classroom, veiled in innocence.

Because really, is it just “fear of laughter” that is causing these distinctions in scores? The GELOPH-15 is nuanced. Some questions don’t refer to laughter at all, and are instead an indicator of how much a person seems to be burdened by the opinions of others. Reexamine the statements:

I control myself strongly in order not to attract negative attention so I do not make a ridiculous impression.

Especially when I feel relatively unconcerned, the risk is high for me to attract negative attention and appear peculiar to others.

These statements probe how much someone is aware of others’ viewpoints, how much someone is conscious of the fact they affect others and produce judgments in others’ minds. This is where the GELOPH-15 seems to test not just laughter, but social phobias and cultural norms of self-control. Although it specifies the avoidance of being “ridiculous” or “peculiar”, many of us might control ourselves to defy other stereotypes. Are we self-conscious about being perceived as “dangerous,” “mean”, “weak,” “bossy”, “dumb”? In a way, self-consciousness is a burden that grows heavier every time we are ridiculed–or every time we see others ridiculed–to conform to our communities. Conforming appropriately is another burden of self-control. The GELOPH-15 tests the shadow of these burdens: it captures whether your culture has tasked you with carrying the weight of others’ opinions. In this sense, the distribution of GELOPH-15 scores across a culture—which has been barely researched so far— reveals how evenly this burden is shared. 

Myths and folklore capture wisdom accumulated across generations, and so they can answer questions about societal burdens that have not yet been answered by research studies. One last myth, recorded in 1942 by a British anthropologist visiting the Nicobar Islands (north of the Western-most tip of Indonesia), warns us of a possible consequence of an uneven distribution of the burdens underlying the GELOPH-15.

Long ago, goes the story, trees could walk like humans. And when people would go on journeys, the trees would help, carrying heavy loads that a human would find hard to bear. One day the humans embarked on a great migration, and all the trees gathered together to help carry their possessions. 

…[A]s the trees were going along, the people who were behind went into fits of laughter at the comical sight of trees carrying their loads and bumping up one against the other. So the trees turned stubborn and would not move any more, for they were angry at being laughed at. So nowadays we have often to overtax our strength in carrying our own loads when we travel, because trees have now become fixtures.¹⁶

Whose loads are we carrying? Do we want to carry them anymore? And for those of us whose luggage has been tossed to the ground by the trees, we can pick up our luggage, and be grateful we weren’t turned into lizards. 

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Patricia Garay is an Ann Arbor native, a graduate of Kalamazoo College with a degree in Chemistry, and a PhD candidate in Neuroscience at the University of Michigan. Her powers have been both enhanced and diminished from so much traditional education. Tricia’s interests include conversing with interesting people, reading books (biographies, evolutionary biology, and sci-fi: check out the Xenogenesis series), and exorcising her demons with art and time in nature. She is embarking on a career in synthetic biology research. Connect with her on LinkedIn for discussions about epigenomics, molecular biology, neuroscience, and transformative collective action in academia, business, and local communities.