Abstract
Across cultures, people find many of the same things funny. Competing theories of humor have been forwarded to account for this. Adopting a view of humor as an evolved response to benign violations, I argue that four comic themes characterize most humor across cultures: pain and misfortune, sex and obscenity, the foreign, and the sacred. I propose that each of these themes are ultimately grounded in our evolved psychology as universal pressure points that humor can tap into. I review 745 descriptions of humor in the ethnographic record of the ten hunter-gatherer societies in the Probability Sample Files (PSF) within the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) World Cultures database, finding support for my account. I discuss the relevance of these findings for our understanding of the evolution and function of humor, arguing that humor evolved to signal and reinforce interpersonal trust and affiliation through reciprocal play with benign violations of socially charged norms and boundaries.
Introduction
Across cultures, people seem to find many of the same things funny. Competing theories of humor have been forwarded to account for this (Morreall, 2023). Since humor is a universal part of the human emotional repertoire (Martin, 2007), it likely evolved as an adaptive response to a set of recurrent challenges in our ancestral environment. Accordingly, recent decades have seen researchers increasingly incorporate evolution into their accounts of humor (Gervais & Wilson, 2005). Yet, data on humor among hunter-gatherers has remained wanting. While every evolutionary theory of humor necessarily requires speculation about its place among ancestral hunter-gatherers, the only systematic attempt up until now to assess what humor looks like among actual hunter-gatherers has been Polimeni and Reiss (2006).
This echoes a general lack in the evolutionary psychological literature. There is a wealth of available ethnographic material on hunter-gatherers from the last two centuries, yet evolutionary psychology has tended to neglect this rich source of evidence (Hallpike, 2018). If all humans up until 10–12,000 years ago lived as hunter-gatherers, then this is in large part the environment we evolved to live in. Of course, there is diversity among hunter-gatherers, and those we have ethnographic data on from the recent past are not “fossils” of our evolutionary past (Kelly, 2013). However, those aspects of hunter-gatherer life that recur across cultures are relevant to making sense of the conditions of our ancestors (Schmitt & Pilcher, 2004), including the original conditions for humor.
The goal of this paper is to systematically survey humor among hunter-gatherers. Advancing a view of humor as an evolved response to benign violations, I argue that four comic themes characterize most humor across cultures: pain and misfortune, sex and obscenity, the foreign, and the sacred. I propose that each of these themes are ultimately grounded in our evolved psychology as universal pressure points that humor can tap into. I review 745 descriptions of humor in the ethnographic record of the ten hunter-gatherer societies in the Probability Sample Files (PSF) within the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) World Cultures database to document the prevalence of the four themes across all ten societies, finding support for my account.
I discuss the relevance of these findings for our understanding of the evolution and function of humor, ultimately arguing that humor evolved to signal and reinforce trust and affiliation through reciprocal play with violations of socially charged norms and boundaries. I contrast my own approach to humor with that of other theorists who stress the importance of expectations and incongruity-resolution in humor, critiquing the overreliance on canned “jokes” with set-ups and punchlines as the focal point of humor research. Rather than serving as a cognitive exercise in disinterested play with form and expectations, hunter-gatherer humor tends to focus on domains of great normative significance, where reciprocal play with norms and boundaries signals, and thereby reinforces, shared trust and mutual understanding.
The Origin and Function of Humor
Traditionally, the most popular theory of humor in the social sciences has been the so-called “incongruity theory,” which holds that humor depends upon “incongruity” (Morreall, 2023). One problem with this theory is that the “incongruity” supposedly required for humor has been imprecisely and inconsistently defined (Warren & McGraw, 2016). A popular iteration of the theory defines incongruity as something that is incongruous with our expectations (Morreall, 2009:11). According to this version of the theory, humor requires something surprising that violates our expectations. Many find this theory intuitively appealing since it seems to explain jokes well: Jokes typically have a “set-up” that sets up an expectation which a subsequent “punchline” then violates (Morreall, 2009:50).
While this version of the incongruity theory would seem to account for the humorousness of structured verbal jokes, it cannot explain many other instances of humor. Consider physical mishaps, something people seem to find humorous across cultures (Polimeni & Reiss, 2006). The popularity of “fail compilation” videos online implies that people find physical mishaps humorous regardless of their expectations. Viewers know that each clip will feature a physical mishap (e.g., someone slipping on ice), yet they still find them funny. Experimentally, Warren and McGraw (2016) have shown that people’s expectations are irrelevant to whether they find such videos of mishaps humorous.
Another iteration of the incongruity theory accounts for non-surprising humor by defining incongruity more broadly to mean something incongruous either with our expectations or our “normal mental patterns” (Morreall, 2009:23). According to this version of the theory, humor requires something that violates either what we expect or what we would normally expect. However, this version of the incongruity theory is in turn much too broad to satisfactorily account for humor. For instance, it cannot explain why mild physical mishaps are typically humorous (e.g., slipping on a banana peel) while strokes of luck (e.g., winning the lottery) or terrible turns of fate (e.g., being diagnosed with cancer) are not, despite all being incongruously unexpected and atypical.
An iteration of the incongruity theory that offers more precise conditions for humor is the so-called “benign violation theory,” proposed by Thomas Veatch (1998) and later expanded by the psychologists Peter McGraw & Caleb Warren (2010, 2016; Warren et al., 2021). Firstly, the benign violation theory stipulates that the violations required for humor must have a negative valence, hence mild physical mishaps like slipping on a banana peel are considered humorous while purely positive incongruities (e.g., strokes of luck like winning the lottery) are not. For something to be humorous, it must be incongruous not with our expectations of how things usually are but rather with our normative sense of how they “ought” to be. In other words, it must be appraised as wrong, bad, or threatening.
Secondly, the benign violation theory stipulates that for such violations to elicit humor as opposed to purely negative emotions, they must ultimately be appraised as benignly non-worrisome (i.e., normal, harmless, or okay). This explains why mild physical mishaps are funny while serious violations like being diagnosed with cancer are not. For something to be humorous according to the benign violation theory, two appraisals must then co-exist: a benign appraisal and a violation appraisal. By specifying that the violations required for humor must have a negative valence and including the condition of benignity, the benign violation theory builds on the incongruity theory to more accurately differentiate what is humorous from what is not (Warren & McGraw, 2016).
This account makes sense in light of the supposed evolutionary origins of humor in social play. While humor is often posited as uniquely human, social play is an activity engaged in by most mammals, with an evolutionary antecedent of human laughter manifested in the laughlike panting that accompanies the “play face” of many other great apes (van Hooff, 1972; Gervais & Wilson, 2005; Winkler & Bryant, 2021). In play, animals typically benignly violate each other’s physical boundaries through play fighting, wrestling, chasing, and the like (Aldis, 1975). Play signals like the play face here ensure that violations are understood as benign, preventing misunderstandings from escalating the play fighting into actual violence (Pellis & Pellis, 1996).
The first violations to elicit laughter are thus thought to have been the benign physical violations that comprised the rough-and-tumble play of early humans, constituting a kind of “protohumor” (Gervais & Wilson, 2005). During our evolutionary trajectory, the benign violation theory suggests that the stimuli capable of eliciting humor were then gradually expanded to include other kinds of benign violations, such as the interpersonal violations of teasing (Keltner et al., 2001), the linguistic norm violations of puns and wordplay (Attardo, 1993), or the social norm violations of embarrassment humor (Hye-Knudsen, 2018). In the face of a benign violation, humorous amusement then motivates us to explore and play with its implications while laughter serves as a play signal inviting others to join us.
We can glimpse what this gradual expansion of our play palette would have looked like by observing the other great apes, who sometimes veer into behavior that we label humor when committed by humans. While most ape play consists in simple physical violations, the other great apes are also capable of committing more complicated interpersonal violations in the form of teasing (Laumer et al., 2024). One ape may offer another an object and then pull it away as they reach for it, or they may playfully disrupt others’ activities by snatching an object they are using away from them. Neurochemically, humorous amusement also retains continuity with the positive affect of play, relying on many of the same neurotransmitters, including dopamine and endogenous opioids (Panksepp & Biven, 2012).
Just as social bonding is one of the functions of play, so too it has been proposed to be the ultimate function of humor (Dunbar, 2022). This is supported by the fact that the endogenous opioids elicited by humor are associated with bonding (Manninen et al., 2017), just as the contagiousness of laughter underscores its social nature (Gervais & Wilson, 2005). One of the early contentions of evolutionary psychology is that humans should have evolved dedicated adaptations for cultivating and maintaining social relationships with valuable cooperative partners (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996). The rudiments of humor in great ape teasing offer a window into how humor may have come to fulfil this adaptive function.
Teasing among great apes has been suggested to serve a bond-testing function, allowing individuals to assess the quality of their social relationships (Winkler & Cartmill, 2026). By imposing a mild cost on a target in the form of a benign provocation while closely monitoring the target’s response, the teasing great ape can glean information about how much the target values the relationship. Reciprocal teasing banter in humans has been proposed to fulfill a similar, elaborated function: By benignly provoking each other without either party taking offense, the participants are in effect saying, “We are close enough that we can say anything about each other” (Terrion & Ashforth, 2002:72). Starting with small provocations and gradually ratcheting up the offensiveness of teases can thus be a way to build a bond of trust.
While not all humor involves benign interpersonal violations in the form of teasing, all humor involves benign violations of some kind of norm or boundary, according to the benign violation theory. In humor, the participating parties play around with saying and doing the wrong thing for fun, violating social and moral boundaries while trusting that the other party will recognize those violations as benignly intended. Humor with those we do not yet know well may start through safe, tame violations of norms ascribed relatively little weight, like the linguistic norms violated in puns and wordplay, but as a bond of trust is built up between the participating parties, the limits of what can be benignly joked about can be widened to encompass much more severe violations. In this way, an instance of humor, just like acts of teasing, can be read as an “an invitation to intimacy” (Haugh & Pillet-Shore, 2018:246).
The account of humor put forward here thus proposes that humor ultimately evolved to serve bonding and affiliation through reciprocal play with benign violations. This is consistent with other evolutionary accounts that see humor as a general affiliative signal (Li et al., 2009). The party toward whom humor’s affiliative signal is directed need not be the same party that the violation is aimed at. When a violation targets a third party or an outgroup, the signal of trust is instead directed at whoever shares in the joke: their shared appraisal of the violation as benign, and their choice to laugh along rather than object, itself affiliates joke-teller and audience. Self-deprecating humor may work by a similar logic: exposing an unflattering truth about oneself is a kind of violation, one that requires trusting the audience not to judge or exploit it, and their appreciative laughter signals that this trust is well placed. While humor may be used for different proximate ends, its ultimate purpose on this account is thus affiliation.
Cross-Cultural Contents of Humor
The most touted point in favor of the benign violation theory since its inception has been its predictive value. A wide range of empirical experiments have pitted the benign violation theory against other humor theories, including other conceptualizations of incongruity, and it consistently outperforms its contenders in predicting what people will actually find funny in experimental settings (Warren et al., 2021). For instance, in one study participants were asked to retrieve an example of a humorous or non-humorous online video and then rate it on criteria derived from each of several rival humor theories; of these, ratings based on the criteria of the benign violation theory best distinguished humorous from non-humorous videos (Warren & McGraw, 2016). However, these studies have largely used student samples from WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic; Henrich et al., 2010). Whether this aligns with what people find funny in traditional societies remains an open question.
The only attempt until now to systematically examine humor in hunter-gatherer societies has been Polimeni and Reiss (2006). Using the eHRAF (Human Relation Area Files) database, they searched the ethnographic records of 10 hunter-gatherer societies, picked on account of the authors’ familiarity, for 30 words related to humor. Their criteria for including a “humorous account” was that at least one native had to explicitly be said to laugh at or acknowledge the humor of the situation. This left them with a sample of 95 “humorous accounts” across the ten societies, which three independent raters then judged whether accorded with nine different theories of humor, including Veatch’s (1998) early formulation of the benign violation theory.
However, ethnographic descriptions of humor rarely include enough context to adequately judge whether any individual humorous episode accords with any given humor theory. Consequently, Polimeni and Reiss’s coders achieved too poor interrater reliability for them to conclude anything. Instead, they contended themselves with listing some themes observed in their sample:
the antics of children, lewd comments, sexual jokes, teasing, mocking others who were too serious or in positions of authority, spousal jibes, slapstick maneuvers, uncomfortable laughter to save face, and humor to quell conflicts within a tribe (p. 359).
While this impressionistic list is merely intended as exemplary, it points to an alternative approach to directly coding each ethnographic account against the criteria of individual humor theories. Since ethnographies do not tend to include enough context for this, it may instead be preferable to look for cross-culturally recurrent themes, which can then be explained by theory.
Other researchers have offered somewhat more systematic lists of cross-cultural humor themes. Alford and Alford (1981) attempted a “holo-cultural” study of humor, surveying ethnographic descriptions of humor not just for hunter-gatherer societies specifically but for the entire Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, comprising 186 cultures, primarily agricultural and horticultural societies (Murdock & White, 1969). They mention ten “contents” of humor:
sacred objects, events, or persons… the misfortunes of others, parts of the body, functions of the body, deformity, stupidity, clumsiness… unwarranted (or deflated) pretension… sexual humor… scatological humor (Alford & Alford, 1981:154).
While the authors suggest that these categories “capture[d] the data quite well,” they admit, “in retrospect,” that they “could have been broader and more inclusive” (p. 154). Notably, they were not theoretically motivated and are thus hard to draw conclusions from.
Mahadev Apte, in his seminal Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach (1985), reviews previous anthropological research on humor and, in the context of ritual humor, discusses the following “[g]eneral attributes and techniques”:
an absence of social control; behavior contrary to established cultural norms; extensive sexual and scatological elements; a burlesque of rituals, people in authority, and foreigners; and an appearance of disorder and chaos (p. 155).
The correspondences between Alford and Alford’s (1981) and Apte’s (1985) list, such as sexual and scatological humor, suggest that they might accurately reflect cross-cultural themes. However, Apte’s categories, like Alford and Alford’s, are arbitrarily limited, likely because they were not an attempt to create an actual typology of cross-cultural humor.
A list with broader and more inclusive categories can be found in the work of Julian Steward (1930). Based on his study of ritual clowning among a variety of Native American tribes, Steward proposed four “comic themes of universal occurrence,” which he suggested were “basic to all cultures” (p. 348). These are:
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1.
Pain and misfortune
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2.
Sex and obscenity
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3.
The foreign
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4.
The sacred
This grouping of themes is superior to Alford and Alford’s and Apte’s in that its categories subsume theirs. More importantly, it also makes sense theoretically. Steward based his list of themes on observation instead of theory, but all four correspond to areas of life where evolution makes it likely for all human cultures to have normative commitments that can be benignly violated to humorous effect, explaining their universality (Hye-Knudsen, 2023).
The first theme, pain and misfortune, derives from our aversion to threats to our health and survival. A suite of negative emotions has been instilled in us by natural selection to steer us away from harm to our person (Nesse, 2019). People may derive humor by making light of their own or others’ pain and misfortune, or by exposing others to pain and misfortune, such as through the benign interpersonal provocations of teasing (Keltner et al., 2001). The second theme, sex and obscenity, derives from the central role that sex plays in human life, as it does in the lives of all sexually reproducing animals (Buss, 2016). This means that societies everywhere have developed norms to regulate sexuality, such as rules of modesty and gender expression, which humor can be garnered from violating.
While Steward’s first two comic themes correspond to the core evolutionary principles of survival and reproduction, the third and fourth theme derive from our social natures as creatures with cares beyond our own immediate genetic interest. A key part of the evolutionary strategy of our species involves congregating in social groups united around sacralized norms and institutions invested with strong emotional significance (Graham & Haidt, 2012). This is the theme of the sacred. The final theme, the foreign, in turn derives from the fact that outsiders and other social groups inevitably differ from the salient norms of our own culture (Moffett, 2019). While the theme of the sacred derives from in-group concerns, this last theme thus derives from feelings towards out-groups and their members.
If humor is an evolved response to benign violations, then it makes sense that, cross-culturally, it should converge around these four themes, each corresponding to an area of life with strong evolutionary significance, where people everywhere are consequently likely to have normative commitments (Hye-Knudsen, 2023). This echoes animal play: Theoretically, the “free play” of animals could go anywhere, with a pair of playmates exploring any and all aspects of their own physicality; yet, in practice, it converges around a few themes pertinent to each given species, stereotyped high-stakes scenarios like fighting and fleeing (Aldis, 1975). The four comic themes are a psychological equivalent, constituting universal pressure points in our evolved psyche that humor can tap into across cultures.
While the benign violation theory predicts that humor should converge around those areas of life in which people have normative commitments, this is not so for other theories of humor. It is not predicted by the variations of the incongruity theory that focus purely on expectations or our normal mental patterns. As Greengross and Mankoff (2012) have noted, a fault of many humor theories is that they are constructed purely to explain jokes. Jokes—with set-ups and punchlines—create misdirection through the violation of a linguistic norm against ambiguity (Hye-Knudsen, 2021). Here, subject matter seems irrelevant. However, whether such pure verbal play actually accounts for a significant amount of everyday humor even in contemporary Western societies, much less traditional ones, remains doubtful.
Methods
The Probability Sample Files (PSF) is a subsample of the eHRAF (Human Relations Area Files) World Cultures database. The eHRAF World Cultures database is an online collection of ethnographies, containing more than 760,000 pages of information about a large assortment of world-wide cultures (eHRAF, 2022). The PSF is a random stratified subsample, developed to overcome the problem of bibliographic selection bias and the nonindependence of societies when doing cross-cultural research (Naroll, 1967). For its creation, the world was divided into 60 major culture clusters, and a random society was chosen from each, provided it met certain data quality control criteria. Ten of these are classified as hunter-gatherers, deriving more than 86% of their subsistence from wild resources (see Fig. 1). These ten societies have been used as a sample before to investigate other aspects of hunter-gatherer life (Buckner, 2021).
To collect all descriptions of humor from these societies, I reviewed the ethnographic data available for them in the eHRAF World Cultures Database. I searched for all paragraphs that were tagged with “humor” or which contained any of the following keywords:
amuse, amuses, amused, amusing, amusement, clown, clowns, clowning, comedy, comedies, comedic, comic, farce, fun, funnier, funniest, funny, gag, humor, humour, humorous, irony, ironic, jest, jested, jester, jesters, jesting, jests, joke, joked, jokes, joking, laugh, laughed, laughing, laughter, mirth, parody, parodies, prank, pranked, pranking, pranks, pun, puns, ridicule, ridiculed, ridicules, ridiculing, sarcasm, sarcastic, satire, satirical, tease, teased, teases, teasing, wit.
This returned 3016 search results. I manually reviewed each and included all descriptions of humor, whether this was a description of a specific humor episode (someone finding something funny) or a general description of what people tend to find funny in the given society. I did not include descriptions where it was not clear from the context what about a specific episode or subject the people in question found funny, nor did I include descriptions of characters finding something funny inside a literary text, such as a transcribed folk tale.
This left me with 745 ethnographic descriptions of humor across 112 distinct sources, distributed among the ten societies (see Fig. 2). For each of these descriptions of humor, I coded whether they involved any of the four comic themes. Previous research on humor among hunter-gatherers has noted the prevalence of teasing (Boehm, 2001). All teasing was counted as belonging to the theme of pain and misfortune, since it involves exposing others to pain/misfortune through a benign interpersonal provocation (Keltner et al., 2001). However, since I thought it would account for a lot of humor descriptions, I also coded teasing as a subcategory by itself. To contrast the four comic themes with the pure verbal play that some humor theories focus on explaining, I also coded whether any given instance of humor relied on a linguistic quality, such as misdirection through ambiguity.
All in all, I consequently coded all 745 descriptions of humor for six different variables (see Table 1). To establish interrater reliability, I had an independent secondary coder, blind to my research questions and hypotheses, code the society with the median-most descriptions of humor, the Mbuti (with 91 descriptions of humor). For quantitative coding studies, establishing interrater reliability is a widely acknowledged way of determining the trustworthiness of a study and the objectivity of the coding scheme used (Neuendorf, 2010). The full dataset and code are available in the supplementary material, along with concrete examples and explanations of coding decisions. For all six coding categories, we achieved an interrater reliability above 0.8 as measured by Cohen’s Kappa. According to a commonly used source for interpreting the level of agreement when using Cohen’s Kappa, this is equivalent to a “strong” level of agreement (McHugh, 2012:279).
Results
The four comic themes were present in all ten societies, supporting the idea of their universality (see Fig. 3). All of the 113 distinct sources containing descriptions of humor invoked one or more of the comic themes, and only two out of all 745 humor descriptions did not invoke at least one. These two exceptions were both descriptions of people being given humorous nicknames referencing a personal characteristic of theirs. In all other instances of humorous nicknames, it was explicit from the text that they were a form of teasing, invoking the theme of pain and misfortune. As such, it is likely that the two examples where it was not explicit from the text were also examples of teasing, meaning that the four comic themes are exhaustive and can account for all 745 humor descriptions in the sample.
In all ten societies, pain and misfortune was the most common theme. While each of the other four comic themes accounted for roughly a quarter of all humor descriptions (between 26 and 30%), 88% involved pain and misfortune. However, as expected, most of this was teasing (see Fig. 4). Since the other great apes are also capable of teasing (Eckert et al., 2020), this would seem to suggest that most humor, at least as it is practiced in traditional societies, is of a kind that is not entirely unique to humans. If all instances of teasing were discounted from the theme of pain and misfortune, each theme accounted for roughly a quarter of all humor descriptions. If treating each source as a coding unit rather than individual humor descriptions, these proportions were even higher, with 94% of all sources involving pain and misfortune, 81% teasing, 46% sex and obscenity, 63% the foreign, and 54% the sacred.
While only four humor descriptions involved all four comic themes, a majority involved more than one (see Fig. 5). In other words, the four comic themes are far from mutually exclusive. For instance, multiple descriptions of humor involved someone mocking (theme: pain and misfortune) the religion (theme: the sacred) of another culture (theme: the foreign). By contrast, language-based humor—i.e., humor that relies on a linguistic quality of what is said, such as ambiguity in the case of puns and wordplay—only accounted for 14% of humor descriptions. If treating the sources in their entirety as the coding unit rather than individual humor descriptions, this proportion was slightly higher, with 37% of all texts containing at least one instance of language-based humor. Even granting that some of this apparent rarity may owe to ethnographers, working in a second or third language, not picking up on subtler instances of language-based humor, this still pales in comparison to the fact that every single source in the sample involved one or more of the four comic themes.
This is relevant since so much humor research up until now has focused on explaining structured verbal jokes with set-ups and punchlines, which rely on creating misdirection through ambiguity (Greengross & Mankoff, 2012). Examples of jokes following this traditional structure were virtually absent in the sample. Instead, the majority of humor involved teasing, playful interpersonal violations directed at another person. When not consisting in direct interpersonal teasing, the humor involved areas of life where the people engaging in and/or appreciating the humor were likely to have strong normative commitments that could be violated to humorous effect, typified by the four comic themes of universal occurrence. These four universal pressure points—pain and misfortune, sex and obscenity, the foreign, and the sacred—seem to typify the humor characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies.
Discussion
The fact that teasing, the variety of humor that is not unique to humans, is the most common subtheme among hunter-gatherers, accounting for a majority of humor descriptions, suggests that it may have been the original form of humor. It is also the variety of humor that most resembles the rough-and-tumble play from which humor likely evolved, with the physical violations of play giving way to the more abstract interpersonal violations of teasing. Just as teasing may serve a bond-testing function in other great apes (Winkler & Cartmill, 2026), reciprocal teasing in humans can take on a more elaborate, ritualized form of the same function, with two parties teasing each other as a mutually recognized signal of the strength of their relationship (Haugh & Bousfield, 2012). Not taking offence to a teasing provocation (i.e., appreciating it as benign) requires and thereby signals interpersonal trust. This function is utilized by joking relationships, an institutionalized relation found across many traditional societies wherein certain parties are expected to tease one another whenever they interact (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940). Six out of the ten surveyed societies are explicitly said to have joking relationships, namely the Mbuti (Turnbull 1965b:291), the Copper Inuit (Damas, 1984:403), the Ojibwa (Dunning, 1959:126), the Tlingit (Olson, 1967:14), the Blackfoot (Hanks & Hanks, 1950:163), and the Ona (Chapman, 1982:174).
It is not only in the societies explicitly said to have joking relationships that teasing is associated with interpersonal bonding. Cipriani (1966) remarks of the Andamans that the humorous “exchange of obscenities is … a sign of friendship” and reports using this to his own benefit, exchanging joking interpersonal provocations with Andaman people to establish a friendly relation in order to trade with them (p. 21). As with joking relationships, it is not just interpersonal teasing but obscene teasing that is engaged in, thereby also involving violations of norms of decency and invoking the theme of sex and obscenity. For instance, Dunnings lists a variety of established obscene phrases that are invariably invoked when Ojibwa engage in such teasing, such as “what is wrong with his penis,” “your worn-out old penis,” and “your old grandmother’s penis” (1959:126).
A similar logic may allow humor to signal, and thereby reinforce, interpersonal bonds even when the violation at its center is not an interpersonal, teasing one. Attempting humor by violating any norm ascribed social weight, not just interpersonal ones, requires and thereby signals trust that the recipient will interpret it as benign instead of malign. If the recipient responds by appraising it as benign and laughing, that signals reciprocal trust. For instance, Gusinde notes that Ona men, when by themselves away from women and children, engage in “coarse jokes and offensive remarks about women” that they never otherwise permit themselves (1931:1652). A bond is thereby forged through mutual complicity in transgression. Relatedly, Wiessner (2014) found that the vast majority of humor among Ju/‘Hoansi occurs at times of day when people are segregated by gender and age, allowing people to joke freely without overstepping the rules of respect organized along these lines.
Jokes reinforcing ingroup bonds at the expense of outgroups are not restricted to gender but also extend to foreigners, invoking the theme of the foreign. Such outgroups include other local bands or tribes with differing norms, such as the Blackfoot mocking the custom of eating dogs among the Cree (McClintock, 1968:238), or surrounding societies, such as the Mbuti mocking the rituals and institutions of their surrounding Bantu villagers (Turnbull, 1965a:294). Foreign ethnographers studying the surveyed societies commonly describe themselves becoming the butt of humor on account of their “naïvete and ineptitude” in native affairs (Dunning, 1959:ix) or their awkward grasp of the native language (Gusinde, 1931:104). The ethnographer may turn this to their advantage by playing along, becoming a participant in the humor rather than merely a subject of it, thereby engaging the natives in an unofficial reciprocal joking relationship (e.g., Cipriani, 1966:21).
Jokes about the sacred may be particularly potent since the sacred is that which is otherwise accorded most social weight. Of course, humor may safely be garnered internally from the sacred beliefs and rituals of other societies (e.g., Dunning, 1959:16). However, native religious figures such as shamans may also be mocked as ineffective or frauds behind their back (Jenness, 1922:205). In some societies, shamans are said to be acutely aware and wary of these insults, with people being taught from childhood to avoid even smiling around shamans “for fear that the shaman will suspect mockery and let loose his armaments” (Landes, 1938:296). Mocking another group’s customs may similarly be explosive if it does not occur where a requisite relation of trust and affiliation is established. For instance, Tlingit dance performances around other tribes may lead to violence if errors on the part of dancers should occasion mockery from the outsiders (De Laguna, 1972:615).
While the aforementioned suggests that the ultimate function of humor is to signal and reinforce trust and affiliation through reciprocal play with benign violations, the affiliative nature of humor in turn makes it an ideal resource for accomplishing other proximate ends. For instance, teasing is widely recognized as a mechanism used by hunter-gatherers to reinforce norms (e.g., Turnbull, 1962). When someone deviates unacceptably from reigning norms, they may be teased as an indirect way of nudging them back toward normative behavior. Boehm (2001) suggests that this is a central component of how hunter-gatherers maintain social order without centralized authority. While this is undoubtedly an important function of humor, it is unlikely to be its original evolutionary function since it piggybacks off the affiliative signal that humor carries. The reason that teasing is preferred over direct confrontation is exactly because it “soften[s] the criticism” by couching it in humor (Turnbull, 1983:55), which is otherwise recognized to function as a signal of goodwill.
Paradoxically, humor may also be used to get away with deviating from otherwise reigning standards of behavior by couching one’s violations in humor. Most commonly, ethnographers describe humor being used as a non-comital way of violating social mores or interpersonal boundaries to indicate or fulfill sexual desire. The risk of rejection is minimized if an advance is coated in benign humorousness since it can always be brushed aside as just a joke, capitalizing on the affiliative signal of humor. Landes (1937), for instance, notes that Ojibwa men teasingly refer to their female joking relatives as “my debtor,” implying that they have sexual rights to them (p. 45). Among the Ona, “tender teasing” is similarly said to be the beginning of any love affair (Gusinde, 1931:445). Multiple observers report being bashfully taken aback when finding themselves on the receiving end of raunchy overtures from natives couched in humor, including Pryde (1972:89) among the Copper Inuit and Turnbull (1962) among the Mbuti. Turnbull, for instance, recounts how a woman marks her interest in him through a double entendre based on his nickname “the long one” (p. 141).
Finally, the positive affect involved in humor may also be utilized for its own proximate ends. Humor not only involves dopamine but also the release of endogenous opioids, which supports bonding and affiliation (Manninen et al., 2017). However, its mood-lifting and palliatively soothing effects also makes it ideal for coping with negative emotions (Hye-Knudsen et al., 2024). Condon (1983) describes how the Copper Inuit deliberately make use of and seek to inculcate in their children the ability to laugh at negative events, as a way of coping with the stress that comes from living in a harsh environment (p. 201-2). So too humor is described in many societies as a resource used to manage the emotions of others, such as by including comic elements like clown spirits in otherwise serious, dysphoric rituals (Gusinde, 1931). While it is unlikely that humor originally evolved to “treat” or cope with other adaptive emotional systems in this way, this is another reported proximate end of humor that can be made sense of through the framework of humor ultimately serving affiliation.
By contrast, the virtual absence in the sample of jokes that create misdirection through ambiguity, thereby playing with the audiences’ expectations to create humor, suggests that these should not be treated as the paradigmatic example of humor. This may be counted as a point against those theories of humor that treat expectation-violation or error-detection as its central and defining mechanism (e.g., Hurley et al., 2011). In fact, the content of most humor in the sample is predictably formulaic, revolving around the same basic themes and gestures. For instance, Dunning notes that any occasion of vulgarity among the Ojibwa, along with his stock list of recurring obscene insults like “[W]hat is wrong with his penis[?]”, are “invariably immensely successful in provoking hilarity” (1959:21). This repetitiveness in hunter-gatherer humor contents might also be counted as a point against those theories of humor that propose it to have evolved as a sexually selected signal of creativity or intelligence (Miller, 2000), even if creative and intelligent uses of humor may of course now function as such a signal. Instead of being a sexually selected mating signal, the account forwarded here proposes humor to function as a general affiliative signal, which can serve to “indicate interest in social relationships” broadly, not just mating relationships (Li et al., 2009:923).
Conclusion
The idea that humor revolves around benign violations is not new (McGraw & Warren, 2010), and neither is the proposition that humor serves affiliation. This has long been hypothesized based on its origins in social play (Provine, 2001), its neurochemical substrate (Manninen et al., 2017), and its contagiousness through laughter and amusement (Gervais & Wilson, 2005). However, the mechanism through which benign violations evolved to serve affiliation has not yet been spelled out. Here, I have surveyed humor among ten hunter-gatherer societies, showing that most hunter-gatherer humor involves interpersonal teasing or violations of norms related to areas of human life where evolution has saddled us with strong normative commitments, indexed by the four comic themes of pain and misfortune, sex and obscenity, the foreign, and the sacred. Based on this, it is my contention that humor likely evolved to signal and reinforce trust and affiliation through reciprocal play with benign violations of socially charged norms and boundaries. This account explains both the recurrent contents of hunter-gatherer humor and the functional uses attributed to it by ethnographers.
This study has focused on humor among hunter-gatherers, but future research may expand this scope to see if the patterns observed extend to other societies, cataloging and analyzing humor along these lines across the entire Standard Cross-Cultural Sample instead of just the ten hunter-gatherer societies in the PSF. If the four comic themes are indeed universal, the general pattern should be replicated, but differences in subsistence type and other aspects of culture may also impact the prevalence of certain contents and types of humor observed across societies. Moreover, the account of the function and mechanisms of humor put forward here may also be tested empirically and experimentally using contemporary populations. If humor does indeed serve to signal and reinforce trust and affiliation through reciprocal violations of socially charged norms and boundaries, then humor between people with close, high-trust relationships should be notably more offensive, and manipulating perceived trust and closeness should change the level of offensiveness of humor produced and appreciated as benign. If supported, such findings would suggest that humor’s power to bond people lies in its capacity to transform norm violations into signals of mutual trust.
Data Availability
Data is provided within the manuscript or supplementary information files.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nina Juel Andreassen for serving as secondary coder for this study, Karthik Panchanathan and Mathias Clasen for feedback and guidance, and Joseph Carroll, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Edgar Dubourg, and Nicolas Baumard for stimulating discussions that helped to formulate these ideas.
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Hye-Knudsen, M. The Contents and Function of Humor Among Hunter-Gatherers. Hum Nat (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-026-09532-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-026-09532-1