From a piece about the highly developed social behaviors of animals by Alexandra Horowitz and Ammon Shea in the Sunday Review of the New York Times:

“You’re at a dinner party. Your hostess regales you with a long, meandering tale of her recent back surgery. It ends with attempted humor: she laughs and glances at you. You laugh in response, trying to convey an appreciation for her humor that you don’t actually feel. Congratulations: you are now at the level of social politeness of chimpanzees.

In this study, the laughs of 59 chimps (yes, they do laugh) were recorded and the sounds analyzed. The researchers discovered that when one chimp laughed others sometimes engaged in “laugh replications” that lacked the full acoustic structure of spontaneous laughter. In other words, they were fake-laughing.”

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They’re humoring us until they’re smart enough to make it their planet:

More simian posts:

• Monkey funeral in Brooklyn.

• Monkey may be a pickpocket.

• Ham the Astrochimp heads into space.

• Monkey washes dishes.

• Drunken monkey throws pennies to children.

• Monkey slaps owl.

• Japanese monkey waiter wears lady mask.

• Barbershop monkey doomed to die.

• Monkey caught stealing grape.

• Monkey invades church.