DAN'S PAPERS, July 2, 2010 Page 54 www.danshamptons.com
Gorilla
(continued from page 51)
“They’d want more. I’d tickle a gorilla for a bit, and then I’d stop and he’d pick up his foot and bring it over very clearly asking me to do the same thing to the bottom of it.” “Would he get tired of this after awhile?” “Didn’t seem so.” “Who would break off the tickling, the tickler or the ticklee?” “Pretty much always it was us. The gorilla would just want more and more.” (At this point, I was wondering what kept a gorilla from reaching over and pulling her arm out of her socket. But I’ll get to that later.) Ross also said that gorillas would tickle other gorillas at play, but laughter would only take place when there was physical contact. Also, if a third gorilla were watching, the other two would
not laugh. There also did not appear to be laughter involved when gorillas did not tickle one another, but then, maybe all the hoots and grunts of communication between them did contain jokes told or funny experiences or something. We really don’t know about that. * * * I would like to add some of my own thoughts to this. For one thing, you should know there is a YouTube going around of a mother lying in bed with her four newborn twins in swaddling clothes in her outstretched arms. Father is hovering over them with a video camera, looking down. He says, watch this, and he apparently makes a funny face and a gurgling sound. All four kids burst out laughing. The
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laughter dies down and he does it again. Again they are this big happy chorus. He does this a third time. Mom smiles through it all, but is too tired to do more than that. One of the great magazine publishers of the last century, Norman Cousins of The Saturday Review, recovered from a terminal illness after the doctors had said he should go into hospice care. He did this by prescribing for himself a course in laughter. His friends told him jokes. He watched Marx Brothers movies, Charlie Chaplin movies, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis even Bob Hope tapes. After recovering, he wrote a best selling book called Laughter is the Best Medicine. He lived into his late 70s, passing away of something else in 1990. In these discussions about laughter, there seem to be three things all lumped together. Research needs to be done on them individually. But laughter occurs from three separate sources. There is, as discussed, laughter from tickling, and it seems to be unique to primates. I tried tickling my dog. Not much came of it, except when I tickled him on his side while he was lying down. Then his leg started reflexively kicking. And that was it. This wasn’t laughter as far as I could tell. But he did kind of like it. There is laughter from joke telling. Here’s one of my favorites. “A Republican is driving down a narrow road late at night and sees up ahead a woman on the side of the road trying to change a flat tire. He looks at his watch and drives on. If he stops he will be late for the club. “A Democrat is driving down a narrow road late at night, sees up ahead a woman on the side of the road trying to change a flat tire and pulls over to help. Within a half hour he has lost the hubcap, three of the six bolts and has broken her axle.” My telling this to my dog elicited his going over to a pot on the deck and lying down next to it. The father making the funny faces gets all four kids going. I would like to know if the other gorillas laugh when one trips over a banana peel. I would laugh. What happens when you tickle, say, an alligator? In 2006, my wife and I had the distinct privilege of going on a safari for two weeks in South Africa and Botswana. Before we left, I had thought long and hard about large dangerous animals in the wild being near enough to me to be photographed. From watching movies, I had concluded the lions and leopards were just out there, waiting in trees ready to leap down and eat people. At least that’s what they do in old movies. I did go anyway. What we found was that large dangerous animals pretty much ignored us. They would be asleep in a field, or just sitting around in the grass, or walking along peeing on bushes like dogs marking their territory, or playing with one another. Family is a big deal in the animal kingdom. Yes, they’d get hungry and the males for the most part would go out on the hunt, but what they were looking for was prey—antelope or kudu or meerkats or other small creatures who could not fight back much. (continued on page 88)