In recent years, though, practitioners of the fanciful art of evolutionary psychology have been more inventive in coming up with Darwinian rationales for laughter. One of the most plausible is from the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran. In his 1998 book, Phantoms in the Brain (written with Sandra Blakeslee), Ramachandran advanced what might be called the “false alarm” theory of laughter. A seemingly threatening situation presents itself; you go into the fight-or-flight mode; the threat proves spurious; you alert your (genetically close-knit) social group to the absence of actual danger by
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