You seem incredibly comfortable in your ignorance so I'll just leave you to it.

Laughing probably does play a role in memory recall and establishing beneficial social arrangements. I don't know if it's massively influencial in who we build friendships with, since it seems to be a general rule that we're drawn to people with similar values / tastes when it comes to finding freinds.

In other words, I'm not sure the purpose of laughter is to signal compatibility, because that function does not seem to be unique to laughter, and generally each evolved behaviour has at least one distinct purpose.

It probably is part of the process of matchmaking though.

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With regards to modern culture, I wonder if it is more the case that our humour is largely the same as it was 2000 years ago, but that the setting it is present in has changed. I moved to a wealthy city recently and one profound thing I noticed was that no one here is funny or laughing much. Humour is almost dead, but go to a comedy show and they laugh constantly and often at stupid things. Has people's sense of humour change much, or is it their environment that has changed? Probably a mix of both, but I think environment is a factor too. I think people are a lot more pessimistic then they would of been 2000 years ago (which initially seems silly, but we're able to percieve more threats in the modern world than we could back then).

Overconfidence leads to a higher rate of being wrong. You should discuss things more before making assumptions. I'll attempt to rephrase my point so you can better understand it.

The biological product of an extremely thorough process of trial and error, your biological design, cannot see. You can see, but you as a consciousness are not your body. The reason your body does not consult your eyes is because it is aware, most likely through the aformentioned process of trial and error, that your conscious mind is not fully perceptive. You might not know there are people watching you or within earshot.

I suspect the reason this is optimal is because breaking engagement with the thing making you laugh means you lose the information it is providing whilst you look to see if anyone is nearby, which would then warrant laughter.

Possibly more importantly, if we had to do a paremeter sweep before laughing, the source of the information / novelty / laughter might have expired by the time we've drawn other people to it. Laughter is immediate and distinct.

From the perspective of designing a biological organism in an optimal way, this makes a lot more sense than having to engage the conscious mind in a decision making process and commit its attention to another task (seeking peers to draw the attention of).

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On your points about yourself, you sound like you might be an extreme outlier. In my moderate life experience I've not met a single person who could consciously decide when to laugh, what to find funny and how loudly to laugh. People have some restraint, to a degree, in specific situations, but what you're reporting is completely unheard of in the human race to my knowledge. A comedian might learn how to not laugh at things they find funny, but laughing is still an instinctive behaviour.

I'm not sure how your comment onf Mastication is relevant.

Your evolutionary design can't see whether there are others that are can see you. It has to operate on the safest assumption. It's better to laugh when no one is there than not laugh where someone is, from the perspective of the above theory.

I didn't understand the superiorty theory explanation and the other two seemed to both be forms of nervous laughter, subversion of expectation.

I study game design and a popular book on this subject, 'A Theory of Fun', poses that laughter is a communicative behaviour to attract the attention of those around us.

This ties into my understanding laughter (somewhat built on the youtube channel 'Charisma On Command which did a video on how to be funny easily); we laugh to draw other people's attention to what we are witnessing. We cheer / applaud for the same reason.

It seems to often be the case that people laugh at something when it presents itself, is unusual / contradicts their expectation of normal behaviour, and then is not responded to in a negative way by the observing community.

We are then updating our knowledge of what is socially acceptable within that community, and broadly bt more vaguely within our society. This usually relates to slapstick and behavioural comedy.

Or maybe someone tells a bizarre story, or acts out an absurd character. We then might be laughing as we update our understanding of human capacity for creativity and exploration of ideas. And we laugh to draw others nearby towards that too.

Maybe something terrible happens to someone, but a) their misfortune as stopped and they are stable and b) we are not at risk of the same misfortune. Very often people find these situations hilarious. Crying and screaming are reserved for different, more urgent or severe messages, but laughter is the 'look at me' reaction. it signals that a stable, safe and observable article of misfortune is present.

All of this could be considred 'learning directive humour / laughter'. Nervous laughter seems to be something else, where we laugh to communicate to others that we've decided to approach a seemingly threatening (physically, socially, whatever) situation by assuming good intent on those in our company. Maybe someone makes an odd comment about knives whilst waving one around. As I recall, nervous laughter only usually comes from those 'in the line of fire'. No nervous laughter = "I'm not putting up with any nonsense". Nervous laughter = "It's ok everyone, I'm going to act as a guinea pig and leave myself vulnerable so we can all see how this plays out".

That's probably not the best explanation of how I view nervous laughter, but I think it's signalling intend / consent to those around us to steer their expectations of an awkward situation.

I talk a lot about a lot of stuff. If you wanna read it, look here; https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LBTqx4krO2hDrM8yuAeIcHBrg9Owoc9OcHhewbfKb2c/edit?usp=sharing