Why Reactionaries Are Humorless

The ultimate takeaway of McGraw’s paper was that the evolutionary purpose of laughter and amusement is to “signal to the world that a violation is indeed OK.” Building on the work of behavioral neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, McGraw believes that laughter developed as an instinctual way to signal that a threat is actually a false alarm—say, that a rustle in the bushes is the wind, not a saber-toothed tiger. “Organisms that could separate benign violations from real threats benefited greatly,” McGraw says.

Photo: Andrew Hetherington

Matches well w/ recent findings that a larger "fear center" leads to (over) reaction & fear, leaving chicken-shit conservatives too scared to laugh & unable to perceive actual threat levels.

Why we steal: We pulled just what The Daily Beast Dish pulled, but whichever flunky pulled it may not have been allowed to come to the obvious conclusion. That's funny.