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Paul Hunter talks to Neuroscientist Sophie Scott CBE about the science of laughter, her days of selling kilts on Southampton Row and her venture into stand up comedy.
Told by an Idiot's Artistic Director Paul Hunter in free-flowing conversation with friends and colleagues from the theatre industry, delving into what made them the people they are today.
Paul: Hello and welcome to Regrets
I've Had A Few.
I'm Paul Hunter,
Artistic Director of Told by an Idiot,
and this is a podcast
where I talk to friends and colleagues,
delving into what made them
the person they are today.
Hello
and welcome.
My guest this month is an eminent
British neuroscientist who I first met
a few years ago now,
when Told by an Idiot,
were conducting an experiment called
the Falling Down Project -
why we still laugh when people hurt
themselves. And we wanted some scientific
input into this little experiment. And
this person brilliantly joined us
and was so fantastically insightful about
why we laugh, how we laugh when we laugh
that we grabbed her and nabbed
her as a regular Idiot.
It's the wonderful Sophie Scott.
Sophie, welcome.
Sophie: Oh, lovely to see you, Paul,
and thank you for this.
Thank you.
Paul: Now, I have to ask.
I hope I've got this correct.
Amongst the many things you do.
Am I right in saying that you are
the director of UCL's Institute
of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Sophie: I am
the director of this Institute, which is
a very interdisciplinary Institute.
What kind of coheres us all together is
we're interested in how the brain works
and at a level where you can kind of
relate that to behaviour,
because neuroscience is a world of stuff.
There's all molecules and bits of cells,
and we're sort of at the level
of the whole brain.
And the whole person is kind of where
we're interested in making maps.
Paul: That is brilliant, because that was my
first question, and you've
answered it perfectly.
Thank you,
mostly for me, because I've probably asked
it before, and it's good for me
to get that back in my brain.
But we've had lots of chats
in lots of lovely places,
like regular visits to the Zoo.
One thing we often return to is obviously
the subject of laughter because it's close
to your heart and it's close to mine
and we'll touch on it quite a bit,
I imagine, as amongst other things. But I
wonder if I could take you right back
to I think Blackburn.
Is that right where you were born?
When you think of Blackburn
and that part of the north of England,
do you
kind of feel there's a very particular
sense of humour that
connects to that place?
Sophie: Probably everybody thinks it's
about where they come from.
But there is a particular
style of quite modern Lancasharian humour
that seems to completely
sit with a Lancashire accent.
Probably the best example I can
think of is a few years ago
I took my son up
to the Northwest for a holiday and we went
to Blackburn and we went up
on a walk up to Darwin Tower.
Darwin is just next to Blackburn,
and there's a big old Victorian tower
at the top of this moor,
and you can walk up and then you walk back
down. Did it a lot when I was a kid
walking up
with Hector getting up to the top
of the tower, and they were
actually doing work on the tower.
And these
men were going around with lots
of planks and things.
And Hector was finding it very,
very funny to spend the entire holiday
pretending we were in Yorkshire,
not in Lancashire,
because he knew it irritated me slightly
and he looked at all this work and he
went, oh, when will
Yorkshire ever be finished?
And one of the guys with all these planks
just went
'appn we'll finish perfecting Lancashire first,
we'll move on ter Yorkshire later.'
'Perfecting' worked so beautifully in that accent.
Paul: Do you have a kind of early
memory of when you first
saw something funny, whether it was a film
or pantomime or what's your
early memories of comedy?
Sophie: Probably, if I'm honest,
it would be my father
coming and getting me and making me watch
Laurel and Hardy films with him
because they used to still be
on television quite a lot then, like
in the mornings on a Saturday and things.
And
he really loved Laurel and Hardy, and he
didn't want to watch it on his own.
He wanted to share it.
And I can recognise that now,
as a parent, it's something I do as well.
It would probably be something like that.
They were also quite big...
My father was a big comedy fan,
so he used to quite often go off
to Blackpool to see big acts and I never,
ever got to see any of them.
I remember him going to see Morecambe and
Wise, and I was beside with anger.
I was so cross I wasn't allowed to go.
But in Blackburn,
there would be a big charity gig every
year and there would be someone like
Ken Dod would come and do that.
And I was going to those from quite
a young age as well. So
it was a sort of a thing.
Comedy was a thing,
possibly because my father was such a big
comedy fan, but
it was a notable part of the culture.
Paul: I can so relate to that.
I think we often,
those memories or shared things
with a parent stay with you, don't they?
And then, as you say,
if you get the chance, it's brilliant.
I remember taking my son,
Dexter, to watch Laurel and Hardy
at the cinema when he was about seven.
And the thing that he was particularly
fascinated by, we will touch on this later
as well, but he was fascinated, I think,
by the comedy of violence
in the films because it's quite violent
and he couldn't quite believe it,
that Stan and Ollie and this woman were
booting each other up the backside.
He thought, it was hysterical.
You forget, in a way,
how violent those movies are
Sophie: You do. You do.
I did something similar
when Hector was quite small and I started
showing him, we got a big box set, m
y partner bought me a big box set of all
the DVDs for Laurel and Hardy,
so we were watching it at home.
That wasn't CGI.
That was two men and a donkey running down
some stairs and falling off the stairs.
That was happening.
Sophie: So your dad is obviously
a comedy buff, which is brilliant.
What about a first glimpse
into the world of science? Is that in your
background or your family or anything?
Sophie: Not at all.
So
most of the people in my family,
like the immediate family,
were people involved in the carpet trade
one way or the other,
both my mum's and my dad's side.
And
beyond that,
my dad's dad was a singer,
and my great grandfather
worked in carpet's
- I'm going back to carpets.
So
wherever you look, there's little exceptions of people doing something else if
you look
at exceptions of someone doing
something else, he's a wild singer.
But then it's pretty much all carpets, so
nothing whatsoever.
And I think
it sounds very cheesy,
but I can remember watching
the Royal Institution Christmas lectures
in 1977. I would have been about eleven,
and Carl Sagan did them,
and he was just so good.
It was fantastic.
It was all about just the planets,
which sounds like just the planets
that's not big size.
But he absolutely brought it alive.
And he had data coming in from
- there was probes that have been sort
of set off earlier that year,
and he was showing us data that was coming
back from these probes,
and it was just spectacular.
That absolutely got me, like
I wanted to do that. I
wanted to be in science.
And of course,
I ended up in a completely
different part of science.
In fact, one of the rare times I really
made a physics teacher laugh is when I
said to my physics teacher,
I was thinking of studying
astrophysics at University.
She just sort of spat in my face
so abruptly enormous was her laughter.
I was not a gifted physicist,
but there was something about it -
he told you a lot about the planets, but
he really brought alive w
hat science can let you do,
how you can just consider
that science is a way of finding out about
the world. He had a very natural way
of communicating that and a real
skill in communicating that.
I think that's what I was getting as much.
That is the message as there was
anything about the planets.
In fact, I'm famously, not famously,
I'm very, very bad at planetary science.
I can't even remember the names of all
the planets and where they are.
I clearly picked up none of that from him.
That's
again, something that can
have a big effect
performatively speaking,
in a sense that sense of performing
something which he was in a way,
I suppose in that lecture
is as much about the charisma or the
way he's communicating, isn't it?
I'm very intrigued by that sometimes,
definitely, as well as the material.
It's how someone delivers it.
Definitely.
I don't think
we give enough credit to this in science
because we kind of imagine that it's just
the framework of facts is all you need.
But you actually,
a great talk, a great presentation
is so much more likely to get people
to take your science seriously because
the performance really matters.
Paul: So when you obviously
you probably just started secondary school
when you had this amazing
moment of seeing the lecture,
did that push you at school into
a passion for the science subjects,
even though physics obviously
wasn't your strength?
Sophie: I was quite good at.
I was good at biology
and not bad at chemistry.
And I got by in physics,
and I was already quite
interested in biology.
My mum, you know like mums
can sometimes save
things you did at school.
My mum saved this project.
I was eight called the Sycamore,
and I've really gone to town on this.
I've written like trees,
trees, trees, trees, trees,
Oak, Ash, Birch.
And then then Sycamore! The
big star of the show.
So I had a taste for the world of biology
from early age, but I think it rewarded me
and I was good at it. I liked doing it.
And I got rewards at school.
I was good at doing
Sciences in general, particularly biology.
So
it became one of those virtuous circles.
Your interest is rewarded by rewards
at school, and that kind
of continues firing your interest.
It was a happy circumstance to me.
Paul: And then how did that kind of manifest
itself? The journey beyond that into,
I assume, higher education
and what you are then how you're
going to take it further?
Sophie: I didn't really know what to do.
I mean, Carl Sagan was very good about
doing science, but I didn't really know
what you then turned that into.
And I can see here where if you had
a parent who knew about that world,
probably I would have
made different decisions.
Neither of my parents
had been to University.
My dad was of the generation where
he left school at 14, you know.
Paul: Same here.
Sophie: Completely.
He was very keen that we went
to University but had no
interest whatsoever.
It's not fair.
He would have liked me to be in a
barrister. So let's put that to one side.
He would have liked that.
Okay, that's never happening.
Right.
So I thought that medicine is what
you did when you're good at science.
And I wanted to be seen
as good at science.
I wanted to shine.
So that seems okay.
I'm going to do medicine.
That's what girls who are good
at science aim for. So I got
some way into my A levels and I thought,
I don't want to do this at all.
I don't want to do medicine.
Do you know what I think this is a moment
of true self reflection on my part.
I think I was right.
I think I would have been
a dreadful medical doctor.
So
if it's not that then what?
And I was a bit kind of at sea and I
applied for and got onto a biology course
at Goldsmith because
I got a, you. know I was
still reasonably good at biology.
Well, let's try that.
And on this biology course w
e'd had a course on animal behaviour,
which I'd never, ever studied before.
And I remember just thinking, this is
amazing. If you can learn all this about
behaviour of geese around their eggs,
what does this mean for humans?
What could you know about humans?
And I discovered there was
a field of study called psychology.
So I tried to change onto psychology
at Goldsmith, and they were like, no,
you're not very good.
You're not good enough for us.
So I went away and I worked for a while.
I sold Kilts
on Southampton Row, and I applied to
other places to study psychology.
And I got accepted of what was then
the Polytechnic of Central London. And
I started there and I was so happy because
I was getting a chance to study something
that really caught my interest.
And even then, I didn't really know
what I could do with that.
And one of my lectures at the end
of my second year said,
you should think about doing a PhD.
Well, fine, then I'll do that,
sounds like a great idea.
So I started applying for PhD
places and genuine serendipity
got accepted onto one immediately at UCL.
So I went straight from my first degree
onto my PhD, which I think just doesn't
happen now. That route
doesn't really exist.
You have to go and do further work,
do Masters and things like that.
Paul: How interesting.
I have to pick up something I was going
to ask shortly,
but you've drawn my attention to it when
you talked about
the study of animal behaviour.
And as I said, I think as many happy
days our families have
spent together at the Zoo.
And I think I've learnt quite a lot about
animals from you actually
wandering around the Zoo.
But we may have touched on this before,
but in terms of laughter,
which I'm going to come back to,
is there animals that in any way laugh
similarly to us or in similar
circumstances or in similar
expression of laughter?
Sophie: Yes
and no. So some laughter
that we produce,
particularly
laughter that we produce when we are
babies, is in response to very kind of
simple physical things like tickling.
And
there are some caveats
to that which I'll come back to.
But actually, that's exactly
the same thing that first
triggers laughter in other apes.
So chimpanzees gorillas and things.
They first laugh when they're tickled
by an adult they're close to,
the same is true for rats as well.
So
there's something interesting about
the relationship between tickling
and the first appearance of laughter
that probably is much more widespread
across mammals that may just be
a commonality that we've yet to understand
more about. So there's a very
broad similarity about tickling.
There are, of course,
other things that will make human babies
laugh that don't work on other animals.
So playing Peekaboo, making silly noises,
tearing up bits of paper, things like
that will make human babies laugh.
Not all of them lawfully.
But tickling tends to work on everybody.
But
human babies seem to be able to cope
with something a little bit more
abstract right from the outset.
And then, as we get older,
laughter is associated with play.
And that's true for humans,
and it's true for other apes.
And it's true for other animals where it's
found, like, particularly rats,
laugh when they make a rats
laughs vocalisation when they're playing.
In adulthood,
humans have had two different kinds
of laughs - very crudely, we have that
really spontaneous, helpless laughter.
And we have laughter that we
use more communicatively.
And chimpanzees
do laugh differently when they are tickled
than if they're trying to make play last
longer, which looks like it might be
something similar to humans there.
But there is one huge difference
in addition to the Peekaboo thing
that is different about humans
and other apes,
which is we laugh contagiously. S
o very often when we laugh,
it's happening purely because somebody
else is laughing.
Now contagious behaviours,
things like yawning,
scratching, blinking,
they're relatively common in nature,
and they're relatively
common in mammals, so
not even just mammals, actually,
I was reading a paper yesterday which said
that contagious yawning is found in many
mammals, even being found in birds.
So kind of catching a yawn from another
member of your species is very common.
It's always much more
likely to happen if it's
another member of your species that you
know, there's some familiarity there,
and that's true for us as well.
So yawning is a really big example
here in contagious behaviours.
Laughter, very contagious for humans,
does not work that way in other animals.
So although chimpanzees laugh very
like us, they do not laugh contagiously.
And
this has been shown very nicely
by a researcher at
Portsmouth University called Marina de
Villaros, and she's shown that
chimpanzees,
they laugh when they're playing.
But playing for chimpanzees
is very physical.
You're interacting with
each other physically.
Two chimpanzees can be
laughing and playing together.
A third chimpanzee can be sitting right
next to them, and they
don't laugh at all.
It doesn't jump the gap to them.
Whereas there's something about humans
and laughter where laughter
can jump that gap.
You don't need that physical contact.
That's maybe the same as the
kind of Peekaboo example.
We can deal with a sort of an abstraction
for laughter with for all other animals,
where you find it, it's very bound up in
an intimate physical interaction as
well as the production of the sound.
And I think that's probably
a very important difference.
I suspect that one of the things
that might be very different about humans
is this is this ability to catch
laughter. Maybe that's got a very
important function
for the use of laughter.
And the final thing that's different for
human laughter is that human laughter can
be driven by things even more abstract.
They can be driven by things that you've
seen or heard it doesn't have to
be someone laughing.
So I'm talking about comedy.
And
no one has found an example
of another animal
reacting to a thing in the world
with laughter, unless that thing is
actual physical play or tickling.
So chimpanzees laugh a lot.
But they don't laugh
when something happens.
Paul: It's really fascinating.
Sophie: It's incredible isn't it?
Paul: Because I sometimes think
infectious laughter when we pick up
on what you say on someone else,
my memory of it if I
think about school days,
it has the combination often
of being brilliant and painful at the same
time, or laughing as an actor on stage,
corpsing when you're not supposed to is
a terrible, terrible thing because
you can't control yourself.
And yet you're trying to control yourself.
Still, for me, one of the funniest
examples of laughter is those two cricket
commentators who can't stop. And we hear
that,
so many people choose that clip
on Desert Island Discs or something
because it's completely
infectious isn't it?
Sophie: It really is.
And I think one of the things that's
infectious about it is that
it's very authentic laughing.
Paul: They're really laughing.
Sophie: They're really laughing and they're
desperately trying to stop.
And that makes it very truthful.
And I think also,
if they had really hated each other, they
wouldn't have been laughing like that.
You're picking up something about
we don't laugh like that randomly.
You laugh, with particular
people in particular circumstances.
So although apparently
it was the first time Jonathan Agnew
had actually done that report.
Oh, really
He had been brought in. There's quite
a good there's a good BBC Sounds
documentary about it,
I'll send you the link
Oh yes please, I'd like to listen to that
If you listen to the whole programme,
someone did once send me a copy
of the whole programme, and actually
they're quite giggly all the way
through. But it's the other way around.
It's Brian Johnson, the more senior man,
the man, he is trying to make
Jonathan Agnew laugh.
And when the famous clip is, of course,
when Jonathan Agnew makes a joke that then
make him laugh and then completely sets
off Brian Johnson,
and then they just bounce laughter back
and forth with each other,
it's why he keeps saying, just stop it
because if you stop I'll be able to stop.
And they are desperately trying to stop.
Paul: And often, I think as a performer,
I often think
there are laughs that audiences do
that sometimes I question the authenticity
of so by that, I mean,
you might be at a Shakespeare play,
and there's a kind of knowing
laugh that says,
I recognise what this references.
And I often think, in that case,
I don't think you laugh like
that in the pub with your mates.
If someone said, you'd have
a different way of laughing.
So I suppose again,
it's like anything when it's authentic,
it really comes from somewhere.
Sophie: Yes, I think that's it.
And the kind of world of communicative
laughter, but it covers all sorts
of things people might be laughing
to show, well,
I understand that this is supposed to be
funny, you probably wouldn't
understand that at all.
People love to cover up emotional states.
People laugh to get other
people to do things for them.
So my brother used to work in journalism,
trade, journalism and he had a colleague
who was always getting stories
who were much better than his.
So he paid a lot of attention to her and
what she did was she laughed a huge amount
and people would tell
her all sorts of things.
And in fact, it's been
shown scientifically.
If you get them laughing, they will share
more intimate information with you.
They feel safer with you.
Paul: That's interesting. Now,
of course,
we're kind of at that stage when you're
at University,
and I know you take your laughter very
seriously, so seriously that you've
actually done some stand up, have you not?
Sophie: Yes I have
Paul: How did that start?
Sophie: Well, it started because
UCL, my University
got a public engagement unit
in the sort of late 00s because one
of the problems UCL has is
we're a very big University.
We have a very international profile.
But actually, in London,
we're kind of invisible.
People have heard of the hospital.
But if I say to my downstairs neighbours
oh I work at the University,
they'll think, I mean,
Imperial or King's College,
the fact that there's a University, right,
just down the road from us,
it won't necessarily be visible to them.
So they were trying to do
this public engagement.
And one of the things they were trying
to do is raise the visibility
of UCL in London.
So they started to do these comedy nights
as a way of kind of getting
skills for the academics performing.
So all the performance,
the exception of the MC and the headliner
would be Academics and students.
And when I first heard about this,
I was like, that sounds awful.
I'd just come back from maternity leave.
And I thought, Why would you put yourself
through that? I've worked
really hard to get here.
I don't want to
piss it all away in a pub with strangers
staring at me in horror, not laughing.
And I was quite happy with that.
And then a male colleague - this is not
a story that reflects well on me -
a male colleague about my seniority
was saying, Well, have you
done these comedy nights?
And I was like, no way.
He said, I did it, It was brilliant.
I went really well and everyone thought
it was great and everyone laughed a lot.
I'm exaggerating slightly. And I thought,
you bastards, you haven't even asked
me, you asked him and he
had a brilliant evening.
So I was like, I'll totally do that.
And then the next thing,
I was locked in a pub toilet just
thinking, wow, God, what was I thinking?
I was so scared.
I thought, I can just start
my new life living in a toilet.
That will be how it is.
And then when I did it,
and I did get some laughs and at the end,
the MC comes on and goes,
ladies and gentlemen Sophie!
I was like, oh, people can do this for as
long as they want to. This is rather nice,
but my main conscious thought afterwards
was I want to see that again,
and I want to do better
because I can think of everything I've
done wrong and then other ways I could
have done it because
stand up comedy is one of those
arts where,
you know, in the moment if it's working or
not, because we're either
laughing or they're not.
But also, that's true of all comedy,
but also stand up comedy,
you only really know if the material
works
if you do it in front of an audience, you
can't rehearse it There must be lots of
other comparisons with comedy here
that you do. But
you don't really know how audiences will
react until you're there trying
it out infront of an audience.
So I have one routine about
being a scientist, which starts with
a good joke based on that
the Blade Runner thing.
I've seen things you
humans wouldn't believe.
And there are three examples of things
that have actually happened in the
laboratory when I've been testing humans.
One of them is someone getting bottom
first into a brain scanner,
someone
getting to the end of experiments and then
when she was being debriefed said I've
been conducting my own experiment
and someone who so hated being in an
experiment climbed out of a window and ran
away, leaving behind their coats and their
shopping. And I thought
that was the funny order.
Start with the bottom
of the brain scanner.
Then I've been conducted my own experiment
and then jumping out of the window
and running away and just doing it
in front of an audience
has taught me that's not the funny order.
The funny order is to go climbing out
the window bottle in brain scanner
and finish with I've been conducting
my own experiment, which I
thought was the least funny one.
Paul: But
that touches on so many things
close to my heart and experience that
as a performer, you can create something
and you only really know
in front of an audience.
I totally agree.
Now, obviously, stand up
Sophie: It's one of those areas.
Paul: But it is fascinating.
Now this is a silly question to ask.
I'm sure you don't,
but there's no tinge of regret that you
didn't back up science for the world
of variety and the music hall, no?
Sophie: No, I don't think anybody's
fooled, you know, I think
people know I'm a professor from UCL.
Paul: Harry Hill is a good example.
Doctor turned comedian.
Sophie: I think the only thing,
if it was a regret,
I would say, I wish I'd done it much,
much earlier and it would have been
hard and it wouldn't have been a route.
I had it easy because I had experience
of standing up and giving talks.
So academics are used to everybody
shutting up if they're making a noise,
which is already stressful
for most people.
And also I had this route in.
These gigs were being
organised at my workplace.
They were looking for us to do it.
So if you take yourself off to do comedy
without either of those things,
you have a lot more to learn. And also
you don't have an automatic into a gig.
People still do it, of course.
But I do wish I'd tried it
earlier because I think
I'd be better now if I started earlier,
I don't think I would
have done anything else.
I love being a scientist.
I adore being a scientist, but it
gives you a set of skills
that are very transferable and very useful
for all sorts of other aspects
of your kind of working life.
It is very useful to have comedy as a tool
you can fall back on when things go
wrong. It's very useful to put yourself
through something you are absolutely
dreading because you do sort of think
my partner is another scientist and has
also done this, he said,
I feel like I could do anything now
and there is an element of that.
In fact, whenever it's possible,
I get my students and my postdocs
to do this because
it's an immersive experience engagement
that you're not going to, that's going to
skill you up as you do it.
And there's nothing else
quite like it for that.
Paul: No, absolutely.
I've only done it really once,
and it's both terrifying and
exhilarating at the same time.
But obviously you're hugely in demand
to talk or be on TV or radio.
Do you feel that's informed when you go
into those more media type positions where
you're having to talk or not really?
Sophie: It's a good question, I think,
because again, when I'm doing anything
for the media, I'm doing it as
a scientist, a talking head.
So I think one of the things
that it gave me was
I got a sense of confidence in being able
to think, well, this is what I know,
and how can I best talk about this,
make this accessible because you have
to do that for a stand up comedy.
So my stand up comedy is
always based around science.
I don't tell jokes.
I'm doing stuff around the, you know
I'll take the science of disgust
and turn that into a comedy routine.
Although I have to say
that was a difficult one.
I tend to overdo it with the dis
gust and upset the audience
and that kind of level of being able to
talk about science in an accessible way.
It definitely helps with that.
That's a very transferable skill.
And then that's very useful when
you're talking on, you know
I did something,
they were looking for people to talk about
communication and the Facebook
crash of the day before
on the radio yesterday,
and I was quite comfortable to do
that because I know the scientific
background, but I'm also fairly confident
I can express that in a way that's
meaningful but also
not misrepresenting the science.
Paul: Brilliant.
Sophie, just before we finish.
I'm going to ask you eight questions
to which I would like you to answer
the first thing in response
to these questions. Here we go.
Morcambe and Wise or Tommy Cooper
Sophie: Morcambe and Wise, sorry, sorry Tommy
Paul: Penguin or Meerkat?
Sophie: Meerkat.
Paul: Dracula or Frankenstein?
Sophie: Dracula
Paul: Blackpool or Margate?
Sophie: Blackpool
Paul: Boxing Day or Halloween?
Sophie: Halloween
Paul: Blue or green?
Sophie: Blue
Paul: Punchline or Shaggy Dog story?
Sophie: Oh,
I do love a shaggy dog story. I can't lie
Paul: Very good. Nobel Prize or Oscar?
Sophie: Well, I have to say, probably Nobel Prize.
I'm much further from the
Oscar. I'm close to neither but
Paul: Sophie it's been an absolute pleasure.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I'll see you very soon.
Sophie: See you soon.
Thank you.
Paul: Thank you.
Cheers.
Bye.
Bye.
Paul: Dear listeners, if you've enjoyed this
Idiot podcast, please spread the word.