The Frequency of Laughs in the Right Frequency

Yesterday I listened to a science podcast called Radiolab.  It was an older one of their shows and it was all about laughing.

One of the segments was about a scientist who was trying to determine if rats laugh.

To make them laugh, the scientist tried tickling them.  But he heard nothing.

Then one of his lab assistants got the idea to use an ultrasonic recording device that could pick up high-frequency sounds the human ear could not.

And sure enough, when they tickled the rats and recorded it with this device, it picked up these odd chirping sounds.  Every time the rats were tickled, they made tons of this noise.  It was just that none of this ultrasonic "laughter" had ever been audible to the human ear before.

I bring all this up because this morning I was writing my strip in a cafe here in Santa Rosa and the man next to me was reading the comics.  He had the comic section folded into quarters, enabling me to see that he was staring right at my strip.  I looked at his face to gauge his reaction.

But his face showed nothing.  Nothing.  Not even the slightest of twitches.

It was then that I realized he was laughing ultrasonically.

Like a lot of my fans.

I am more popular than I ever realized.