Don’t try this at home, but tickling a gorilla, orangutan, bonobo or chimp can inspire bursts of grunting sounds. Yes, that’s laughter, says Marina Davila Ross of the University of Portsmouth in ...

How do whales hear music? They listen to orca-stras! I told that joke to a lizard and got crickets. It made me wonder the same thing as Eid Muhammad Afridi, who asked Saturday's Weird Animal Question ...

Thought it was just humans that are ticklish? Think again - scientists are studying how animals respond to being tickled in a bid to shed light on how laughter evolved. Tickling a gorilla is not for ...

Like human infants, young apes are known to hoot and holler when you tickle them. But is it fair to say that those playful calls are really laughter? The answer to that question is yes, according to ...

Apes often make weird sounds when they're tickled, and some researchers now say these pants and hoots truly are related to human laughter. That's the conclusion of a new study in the journal Current ...

If you tickle a rat's belly, it squeals with laughter. However, we are unable to perceive this laughter as its frequency, around 50 kHz, exceeds the range of human hearing. Neuroscientist Jaak ...

New research has given credence to the idea that laughter evolved in a common ancestor of the great apes and humans. Researchers tickled 22 young apes and three humans and acoustically analysed the ...