Robert Provine, scholar of laughter, yawns and hiccups, dies at 76

Robert R. Provine, a neuroscientist who brought scientific rigor to the study of laughter, yawns, hiccups and other universal human behaviors that had previously gone largely unexplored, died Oct. 17 at a hospital in Baltimore. He was 76.

The cause was complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, said his wife, Helen Weems. Provine had spent four decades as a psychology professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County before his retirement in 2013. He continued to teach at the university in recent years as a professor emeritus.

Provine embodied the spirit of the popular scientist, one who takes his or her pursuits out of the laboratory and into the public square, from university libraries to public libraries, and from lecture halls to radio and television.

He was the author of two books for popular audiences, “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation” (2000) and “Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond” (2012). The publication New Scientist described him as “the man behind the first research into what really makes people laugh,” an endeavor that encompassed developmental and behavioral psychology, neuroscience and theories of evolution.

“Laughter is part of this universal human vocabulary,” Provine once told NPR. “Everyone speaks this language. Just as birds of a given species all sing their species’ typical song, laughter is part of our own human song.”

He was drawn to the study of laughter, among other behavioral phenomena, in part because he had grown lonely in the laboratory, where he devoted the early years of his career to the study of nerve cells.

“I was getting tired of putting electrodes in nerve cells in a windowless room for six or eight hour days,” he told the Boston Globe in 2012. “But I was also interested in examining human behaviors using the same kind of rigorous procedures.”

Those procedures, at first, included inviting study participants to sit in a lab and watch episodes of “Saturday Night Live” or bits by comedians Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin and Joan Rivers. The setting proved unconducive to laughter, however, and forced Provine and his colleagues to change course.

In what he described as “the spirit of Jane Goodall heading out to Gombe Stream Preserve to study chimpanzees,” he set out on an “urban safari” to observe people laughing in shopping malls and on the street. On one occasion, he wrote, a “large and aggressive woman” mistook him for a store detective.

With help from assistant researchers, he observed 1,200 examples of laughter. The team decamped for the acoustic laboratory at the National Zoo in Washington, where they studied recordings of laughter on equipment designed to analyze bird calls. From this research, Provine drew a number of conclusions.

Most fundamental was the observation that laughter usually comes in response not to uproarious humor but rather to dialogue that he compared to an “interminable television situation comedy scripted by an extremely ungifted writer.”