The ability to laugh, like other favored behavioral traits, may have evolved over many generations in response to environmental stresses favoring reproduction among successfully adapted people. This speculative overview depicts laughter as a symbolically-triggered release mechanism that unleashes instinctive drive energies associated with survival, in the process lowering anxiety. The use of humor to trigger the laugh reflex has become a cultural activity in which unacceptable impulses are expressed in an acceptable manner. As this occurs, there is an emancipatory release of repressed energies and assorted conflicts are “resolved.” An attempt is made to examine the neurological events of laughter; here, there is a suspension of cortical-diencephalic inhibitory control, and tensions are discharged from lower centers, the presumed custodians for some of the encoded programs of instinct and emotion.
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