From play to humour: a comparative evolutionary framework

Veronica Maglieri
Ricercatore Indipendente 

Keywords

Violation of expectation, non-human primates, social play, teasing.

Abstract

Humour is typically considered as a uniquely human capacity, closely associated with language, symbolism and culturally mediated cognition. However, this focus leaves open fundamental questions about the evolutionary and developmental origins of the mechanisms that support humour. Here, I adopt a comparative perspective to examine whether some core components of humour may predate language and be shared, in simpler forms, with other primates. Drawing on evidence from developmental research, animal play, expressive signalling and playful teasing in non-human apes, I argue that humour can be deconstructed into elements such as positive responses to incongruity, affiliative signalling, voluntary re-engagement and social regulation of emotional states. Rather than asking whether animals possess humour in the human sense, this contribution proposes a conceptual framework that identifies proto-humour components across species and developmental stages, situating humour within a broader evolutionary continuum and complementing existing human-centred models.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Veronica Maglieri

Veronica Maglieri is an ethologist studying the evolution of social behaviour, emotional communication, and play across species. Her research combines comparative ethology, behavioural ecology, and evolutionary approaches to investigate the biological foundations of communication and social cognition. She completed her PhD at the University of Pisa and has been awarded a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Long-Term Fellowship to establish her independent research at the University of Zurich.

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