by M E Skeel

Created on: April 09, 2009   Last Updated: May 02, 2009

I only voted no because the question is ridiculous. It is too general. Which animals? Of course some animals have a sense of humor. If we are talking about higher animals such as birds and mammals, the answer is yes, some of them have a sense of humor. Any visit to a zoo or animal park can confirm this: parrots among the birds, monkeys among the mammals. These animals have brains and the ability to communicate and they have senses of humour and often play jokes on each other and their keepers. And most people who have owned pets and farm animals can also come up with examples of playful behaviour that indicates a sense of humor in these species.

In the wild, a sense of humor can be harder to spot and of course there is always the difficulty of anthropomorphism: reading human emotions into animal behaviour. There are a few instances when I have been reasonably sure that an animal's behaviour was not just about finding food or sex but that it was just having 'fun'. I watched a bald eagle one day 'playing' with a merganser and her chicks. The merganser was trying to take her chicks up the river against the current. Every time she got them even with a big dead tree, the eagle would swoop on them, scattering the chicks and causing them to be carried back down the river. The eagle never made any attempt to catch the chicks and it repeated the stunt a half a dozen times and then in between went back to its tree to watch the mother swim frantically about, collecting her chicks and trying again to head upstream. Did that eagle have a sense of humor? I think it did.

So why did I vote no? Because the vast majority of animals do NOT have a sense of humor. Forget about the birds and the mammals for a moment. They make up only a small proportion of the world's species. The vast majority are invertebrates: single celled creatures such as paramecia and amoebae; all the groups of worms; all the arthropods, including millions of species of insects, spiders and crustaceans; the molluscs, the jellyfish, echinoderms and more. There are millions of invertebrate species and the only one that I can think of that seems to have a sense of humor is the octopus.

Most invertebrates have small brains and are not deep thinkers. Their actions are not that of robots and there is some plasticity in their behaviour and most have some ability to learn and modify their behaviour in changing situations. There is no doubt that we almost always underestimate their intelligence and abilities, but in this area I think we are correct in assuming that most of them do not have a sense of humor. It is the exception, not the rule.

So it doesn't matter which side you vote for in this debate, you are going to be wrong. If you say yes, animals have a sense of humor, you are correct for at the most a few hundred species and wrong for a few million species. If, like me, you vote no then you are wrong for a few hundred species and correct for a few million. So overall the 'no's' are more right than wrong and the yes's are more wrong than right. There is someting funny about that but I don't think your average insect would get it.

Learn more about this author, M E Skeel.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.