Do adults laugh less often than children?

Apparently it’s an urban myth 

that children laugh 300 times a day.

I taught in schools for 32 years and children in my classroom didn’t laugh that much. Or at least that’s how it felt. They moaned. They said ‘Aw, miss.’ They avoided work. Most of all they would natter to the person next to them. But to say they laughed 300 times a day seemed a whole lot of laughter to me. 

According to Rod A Martin, author of ‘Do Children Laugh Much More Often than Adults Do?’ children laugh 7.7 times per hour during play. This is based on observations of five-year-olds carried out by the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor. That’s humour without the ‘u’.

If we assume the five-year-olds are awake  early, say 07:00 and go to bed twelve hours later they laugh 7.7 x 12 = 92. 

92 laughs per day.

However children don’t play for 12 hours. They might be in class at age five. They might be at home still. Part of the time they will be interacting with adults, or eating, or having a bath or watching something on a screen. To say five-year-olds laugh 90+ times a day is, therefore, generous.

To test out the myth that adults hardly laugh at all I decided to mark down each time I chuckled, laughed or made some sound in my throat that was more audible

than a simple smile. That was over the course of a short day, approximately midday to 8:00 pm. 

That day a friend came round. We sat in our masks in the sitting room with the doors open. And we laughed. I watched a couple of quizzes on the tv - with Richard Osman. I chuckled. I cooked and listened to the radio and a couple of comedies at night time. In other words I spent more or less a usual day. Of course I was more conscious of the number of times I laughed. That could have raised the number of titters because I was consciously trying to prove adults laugh more than 15 times a day. So this was not a scientific study but I clocked up 44 laughs over a few hours, less than twelve hours at any rate. 

It is true we grow more serious as we age. My younger friends laugh far more than my older ones. However my younger ones happen to be ones who haven’t suffered from depression. And my older ones seem to skirt or delve deep into depression or feel loneliness. Not all. Just more than I would have imagined when I plumped for early retirement. To be mixing with people who aren’t joyous all the time isn’t something I planned after 32 years full time graft. In other words I thought people would be happier than I found them to be. Perhaps I mix in the wrong circles.

To truly test out the theory that adults laugh less than children we need scientific sampling, scientific conditions and a scientific definition of laughter. Plus someone neutral to record the laughs.

But, back to Rod A Martin who does suggest some adults laugh more than their infants.

‘Two-year-old infants laugh an average of about 18 times an hour during interactions with their mothers, whereas their mothers laugh almost twice as often, at about 33 laughs per hour.’ So that’s the research. 

Don’t babies cry a lot? 

Case closed.