Videos

Qayyum – 5 months

Hugo – 14 months

Seems like baby Hugo and daddy James have a similar arrangements:  “Baby Hugo found it hilarious to throw a pillow on my head. After realizing that got him giggling, I decided to see how long he would keep up such a maniacal laugh. Suffice it to say, I’m just glad this wasn’t an anvil.”

Baby B – 12 months

And this little fellow can’t bring himself to cry. He’d rather laugh. Let’s all be like baby B.

The most popular post on this blog is the one that asks ‘Should we tickle babies?‘ A lot of adults don’t like being tickled and babies can’t easily defend themselves. Perhaps we shouldn’t do it. Well, as this video of 9 month old baby Jaxton shows very clearly, babies really do enjoy being tickled. But they will also let you know once it gets a bit too much for them.

Thank you to Stacie, Jaxton and the rest of their family for sharing their video.

In several years of running the Baby Laughter project, I’ve been sent some wonderful and remarkable videos of laughing babies. This video of three month old Callan is one of the best ever. Our research into baby laughter asks two simple questions; what makes babies laugh and why do they laugh. The answer to the first question is clear. Above all else it is people that make babies laugh. Laughter is first and foremost about social connection. We laugh in company, we laugh to share things.

“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people” – Victor Borge

But why laughter. Well, I think part of the answer comes from seeing that for babies, laughter and tears are two sides of the same coin. They are their first forms of communication. Tears say ‘make this stop’, laughter says ‘please continue’. This is obvious for crying but less so for laughter. But, as the millions upon millions of laughing babies on youtube show us, there is something very compelling about baby laughter too. Babies need to learn about the world and within that, the biggest mystery is other people. Baby laughter captures our attention and makes us give the baby our full attention. It is no coincidence that the most popular thing to make a baby laugh is the game of peek-a-boo. It is pure social interaction, and for a baby, pure learning. This is something incredibly important to a baby. They need as much human interaction as they can get. And laughter is their way of persuading us to give it to them. And guess what, it makes you laugh too. Laughter serves a very important role for the baby and it is present from very early in life. So to me, although this video is completely remarkable, it is not entirely unexpected. The video was sent in by his dad, Davide and filmed by his mum Sara.

Thanks to Davide, Sara and Callan.

Tiny Nina is only 11 weeks old but she’s already getting in on the family jokes. Here we see her laughing at the antics of her 4 year old brother. Who is, of course, more than willing to play the fool. Also present and enjoying themselves are her mother and her grandmother. This nicely illustrates how laughter is universal across generations. A more subtle point than you might imagine.   

The cognitive differences between a 4 year old and a baby is just as dramatic  as between an adult and a child. There’s an equal gulf to bridge. But whereas we adults can make a conscious effort to come down to a child’s level.  It is beyond the sophistication of pre-schooler to act so deliberately. But they do have an intuitive ability to empathise and connect with tiny babies (and pets). Making his little sister laugh is tremendously empowering for the four year old.  He knows he is also gaining kudos from his mother and grandmother. No wonder he’s happy and laughing along too.

Nina is still too young to appreciate that she’s make the others laugh but she isn’t too young to connect with them. She’s laughing with her brother not at him. She’s laughing precisely because he’s very familiar to her.  So the strange things he’s doing aren’t scary.  As Darwin perceptively noted, a baby who laughs when a loved one tickles them  would burst into tears if the same was done by a stranger. Thanks to Nina and her whole family for the video.

Our latest laughing baby comes from Naveen and features his wife gently teasing his five month old son Daksh:

In this video, my son (Daksh) is featured. every time his mom scares him to eat him away, he innocently laughs at her. This is so cute. On a hindsight, I tend to think that our lives should be like a kid’s life which is free from worries, and is innocent, cute and always happy. I quite agree that it would be wonderful if we could retain some of the sheer joy that babies possess. It is not alway easy but fortunately, laughing babies help us laugh too.

Thank you , Naveen and much happiness to you, your wife and son.

Enjoy this video of 2 year old baby Finn screaming with delighted terror as he races along on his little bike. If anything, I’d say he wanted to go faster. And like his dad says, you can bet he will love rollercoasters when he is older.


Finn isn’t at all unusual in this. According to our research one of the best ways to make 3 to 5 month old babies laugh is to dangle them upside down. And we’ve all been a little scared to watch proud new dads throwing their giggling young babies high the air. So why do babies find delight in danger and revel in rough and tumble?


I don’t actually know. Partly it is that they don’t know to be afraid. But that same baby could be scared by a small insect or a rustling curtain in his or her bedroom. So that can’t be the whole story. I suspect it comes down to adrenaline. Excitement and fear both cause your body to react in a similar way, releasing a lot of adrenaline and getting your heart racing. It prepares you to react. When the situation turns out not to be dangerous and there is nothing to react to then there is a sense of relief and excess energy has to be expended somehow.

In the spirit of science, I went on a a few roller coasters at Thorpe Park a few weekends ago. Here’s what happened to my heart rate:

THE NEMESIS
THE SAW
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2014-03-22 11.17.59

I don’t mind admitting that at some points I was screaming like a little baby.

Thanks to Finn and his family for the video.

You laugh more in company and even more with your best friends and loved ones. So the obvious question is, do twins laugh more than the rest of us? Let’s examine some evidence.

Lubabah and Zeyanah definitely seem to be having a lot of fun. Youtube has plenty of other laughing twins having just as much fun. Even some laughing quadruplets.
In our parental laughter survey, we asked how many times a day babies laughed. We had 17 sets of twins in our data and on average their parents didn’t report that they laughed more or less than other babies. On average they all laugh around 40 times a day.
But I’ve suspected that parents are largely guessing when they answer that question. For example, parents report that boys laugh more than girls. This might be a real difference but it also be a cultural projection based on expected gender roles.
One parent of twins in Venezuela wasn’t sure if she’d been accurate in her guess of how much they laughed. So the next day she counted. She got to 500 laughs and emailed me to let me know. Which certainly brightened my day and suggests that maybe happy twins are more than twice as fun. Do you know any twins, what is your experience? Are you a twin yourself, did you think laughed a lot as child?
Thank you to Lubabah and Zeyanah and their parents for sharing this video and to Alexandra and family in Venezuela (our thoughts are with you today )