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Humans are fundamentally social animals . Our societal nature entail that we interact with each other in positive , favorable ways , and it also mean we get it on how to manipulate others in a very disconfirming way .
Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin at the University of California , San Francisco , has also recently discovered that irony , which is both positively odd and negatively nasty , plays an important part in human social interaction .
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So what ?
I mean really , who like ? Oh for God ’s saki . Do n’t you have anything good to do that read this column ?
According to Dr. Rankin , if you did n’t get the sarcastic tone of voice of the previous judgment of conviction you must have some damage to your parahippocampal gyrus which is locate in theright brain . hoi polloi with dementia , or headway injuries in that area , often suffer the ability to pick up on sarcasm , and so they do n’t answer in a socially appropriate ways .
presumptively , this is a pathology , which in turn suggests that sarcasm is part of human nature and probably an evolutionarily in force thing .
How might something so , well , sarcastic as sarcasm , be part of the human societal toolbox ?
Evolutionary biologists claim that sociality is what has made human such a successful species . We are masters at what anthropologist and others call " social intelligence . " We agnise and keep track of hundreds of relationship , and we easily distinguish between enemies and friends .
More authoritative , we run our lives by societal calculation . A favour is mentally recorded and paid back , sometimes many years later . Likewise , insults are marked down on the genial score card in unerasable ink . And we are forever brabble and making up , even with citizenry we have sex .
Sarcasm , then , is a verbal pounding that connects multitude in both a disconfirming and positive means . We get laid that sense of humor isimportant to human relationship ; if someone does n’t get your jokes , they are n’t likely to be your friend ( or at least that ’s my bottom line about friendly relationship ) . Sarcasm is simply humor ’s dark side , and it would be just as put off if a friend did n’t get your snide remarks .
It ’s also easy to imagine how satire might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial . think two ancient human beings running across the savanna with a thirsty social lion in sideline . One guy says to the other , " Are we experience fun yet ? " and the other just seem clean and intercept to figure out what in the universe his crony mean by that remark . End of friendly relationship , end of one bozo ’s donation to the future of the human gene pool .
Thanks goodness , because life without out satire would be a dull and way of life too nice place to be , if you take me .
Meredith F. Small is an anthropologist at Cornell University . She is also the author of " Our Babies , Ourselves ; How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent " ( connection ) and " The Culture of Our Discontent ; Beyond the Medical Model of Mental Illness " ( inter-group communication ) .
