>>10877076>Why do humans laugh?It's really a large collection of animals, not just humans.
Heavy breathing and making vocal noise are things that happen when animals exert themselves, like they would when play fighting.
If some animal like a chimp for example is being really serious and focused on some object of interest and another chimp suddenly runs up and pushes him to start a play fight, the sudden disconnecting of the first chimp's focus would be pretty similar to the sudden disconnecting of your expectations of how things normally work with some event that makes you laugh.
It's sort of analogous to diarrhea if thinking / focusing is taken as analogous to constipation. You go from controlled and operating in a normal way with the set of assumptions you define your sense of reality with to being uncontrolled and having spastic body movements and animal noises flowing out of you (unless you're fake-laughing, which is another sort of behavior people engage in that might have less of a precedent with nonhuman animals).
Main difference between other animals and humans for laughter is that other animals will have tactile precipitating events (basically slapstick comedy) while humans will have more purely language / semantic thinking based precipitating events. And the movement of this laughing behavior from physical activity like one chimp smacking another to mental activity like a comedian telling a joke makes human laughter seem a bit more mysterious at first since it's divorced from its original context as a contact sport sort of behavior. It makes more sense when you imagine it as a progression from dogs or chimps tackling each other and letting themselves run wild, making more erratic muscle movements and producing barking / howling noises less because they find something funny and more because they've switched from a more subdued and deliberate state of behavior over to an uninhibited recreational freakout.
