Paper short abstract:

Laughter is best conceptualized as the reverse image of primate-style aggressive mobbing -- mobbing under relaxed, tension-free social conditions. Its emergence was bound up with the overthrow of dominance and its replacement by sexual-political reverse dominance.

Paper long abstract:

African immediate-return hunter gatherers are not only egalitarian but gender-egalitarian. In these societies, pressure to conform to egalitarian norms is applied through derisive laughter aimed at miscreants, using techniques of mimicry and ridicule most effectively deployed by grandmothers and other senior females. In this paper, I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of current Darwinian approaches to the paradoxes of laughter and its evolutionary emergence in our species. I will argue that laughter is best conceptualized as the reverse image of primate-style aggressive mobbing -- mobbing under relaxed, tension-free social conditions -- and that its emergence was bound up with the overthrow of dominance and its replacement by sexual-political reverse dominance.

x