Becky—

What a delight! I like laughing—so to have you provide an evolutionary account of why that’s so (and what it gets me) was of great interest. You’ve covered a lot of ground here, and most of my response has to do with wanting an even fuller account; there are a number of spots where I found myself wanting more information:

--your point is that we are distinguished from other species, but the quote from Dennett that you use to support that claim focuses on the sameness of the fundamental process that produced us all; the claim and the evidence, in other words, don’t quite align

--you tell us that there are two kinds of laughter, Duchenne and on-Duchenne; of course I’m hung up on the terminology: who? where? was Duchenne, and why is his? its? name used to distinguish among forms of laughter (more importantly: I really don’t understand the distinction….)

--the piece you cite from Evolution and Human Behavior, about our choosing possible mates based on their senses of humor, was fascinating to me; I would take that material in a slightly different direction than you do, suggesting that a sense of humor is an index to sociality, and that social skills are in this day and age much more essential to survival than strength; due largely to technological advances, we’ve evolved beyond the need for so much “strength” (you touch on this in the very last line of the paper; I think it could be developed more fully, and earlier)

--your next point, that we laugh to demonstrate our superiority over others, of course runs counter to the one above (and you should note the tension between them): the earlier analysis focused on community-making; this one is about discriminating among the members of a community, constructing a hierarchy of superiority/inferiority

Very entertaining!

--Anne