Do Animals Laugh? Tickle Experiments Suggest They Do
Studies of laughing chimpanzees and rats offer clues about our evolutionary past—as well as our mental health.
How do whales hear music? They listen to orca-stras!
I told that joke to a lizard and got crickets. It made me wonder the same thing as Eid Muhammad Afridi, who asked Saturday's Weird Animal Question of the Week, "Do animals laugh?"
So far, apes and rats are the only known animals to get the giggles.
The great ape also has a special "ho ho" laugh for visitors she especially likes, Patterson says. (Related: "Conversations with a Gorilla" in National Geographic magazine.)
In 2009 Marina Davila Ross, a psychologist at the U.K.'s University of Portsmouth, conducted experiments in which she tickled infant and juvenile primates—such as orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. The apes responded by laughing—technically called "tickle-induced vocalizations."
Ross, who
