What makes us laugh? University of Virginia students turned humor into the subject of audio research
Laughter is often perceived as a spontaneous, almost incidental reaction: someone says an unexpected sentence, a situation slips away from its expected course, or a shared joke appears in a group that only those present understand. But a group of University of Virginia students in the spring semester of 2026 decided to look at humor differently — not only as entertainment, but as a topic that can be explored journalistically, psychologically and sonically. As part of the course
Writing with Sound, taught by Piers Gelly, an assistant professor in the Department of English, the students were given the task of designing and producing a podcast episode, and the shared theme of the semester became a question that seems simple only at first glance: what actually makes people laugh?
The course is designed as a practical entry into the world of audio storytelling. During the semester, students listen to and analyze podcasts, learn how a story is built for listening, practice interviewing, writing for the ear and editing, and then apply all those skills in a final project. According to the University of Virginia’s description, all 15 participants first jointly choose a broad theme, and then divide into smaller groups that explore individual aspects and create separate podcast segments from them. In earlier semesters, Gelly’s students have, among other things, documented 24 hours of continuous life on the university space known as the Lawn and dealt with the popular campus matchmaking experiment called Marriage Pact. This time the focus shifted toward humor, but not in the form of a collection of jokes, rather as an exploration of social signals, emotions and the ways people connect through laughter.
From one word on the board to an exploration of the psychology of laughter
In the group that focused especially on the psychology of laughter were third-year students Harshika Challa, Sankalp Yadava and Nader Bashammakh, as well as fourth-year student Carter Fortune. They devoted the final month of the spring semester to developing the podcast episode, speaking with experts and attempting to translate the everyday phenomenon of laughter into a format that is at once informative, narrative and engaging enough for listeners. Fortune described for the university portal the beginning of the process as a moment in which the word “humor” ended up on the board, and from it about twenty possible directions developed. The class ultimately singled out four subtopics, and his group decided to investigate why people experience laughter as a sign of connection and how that sign can be observed in a laboratory setting.
Such a choice was not predetermined. According to the available description of the project, the students also considered other topics, including different forms of anger, the search for personal identity during college and the broader student experience. Humor nevertheless prevailed because the entire group recognized it as a topic that is familiar enough to everyone, yet complex enough to open psychological, social and cultural questions. It was precisely this tension between everyday life and scientific complexity that gave the project special value: laughter cannot be reduced merely to a reaction to “something funny,” because people often laugh out of politeness, discomfort, closeness, imitation or a desire to show belonging to a particular group.
For the students working on the podcast, the question of who decides what is funny was also important. Yadava pointed out that people find different things funny for different reasons, and in their conversations the group opened topics of children’s humor, inside jokes and the mechanisms that determine why the same situation provokes laughter in some people and not in others. These questions clearly show why humor is not only a cultural ornament or a break from serious topics. It is a way of communication, a means of assessing relationships and often a very precise indicator of how well people understand one another. In audio format, moreover, laughter is not merely a topic of conversation but also sound material: tone, rhythm, the pause before a reaction and shared laughter can tell the listener more than the sentence that caused the laughter itself.
Collaboration with a laboratory for emotions and behavior
The key turning point in the project occurred when the group decided to connect journalistic work with a research environment. Carter Fortune had attended a social psychology course during the previous fall semester and then learned that his professor Adrienne Wood leads the Emotion and Behavior Lab at the University of Virginia. Harshika Challa also had a contact who could help connect them with the laboratory. The collaboration led them to Sareena Chadha, a doctoral student in social psychology who works in that laboratory, and with her help the group decided to study so-called
co-laughter, that is, the shared laughter of several people.
The Emotion and Behavior Lab operates within the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia and deals with the ways people build and maintain social connections. On its website, the laboratory states that it studies social connectedness on multiple levels: from individual interactions, in which laughter, conversation and behavioral synchronization are observed, through social networks, to the broader consequences of cultural diversity. The methods used by the laboratory include acoustic analysis, automated coding of facial expressions, the study of pair interactions, social network analysis and mobile measurement of behavior. For the student podcast, precisely this laboratory framework was ideal because it made it possible to observe laughter as a measurable form of nonverbal communication, not only as an impression or anecdote.
The question of shared laughter is especially interesting because it takes place in the space between the individual and the group. One person may hear a joke, but the social meaning of laughter often arises only when others laugh as well. Shared laughter can confirm closeness, reduce tension, show that participants are “on the same wavelength” or indicate that a situation is safe for relaxation. But it can also have a more complex meaning: people sometimes laugh to hide discomfort, avoid conflict or signal that they understand the rules of a particular group. For the students working on the episode, the challenge lay precisely in how to translate such nuances into a story that an audience can follow without scientific background knowledge, but without simplifying the topic.
Laughter as a social signal, not only a reaction to a joke
The broader scientific context shows that laughter is increasingly being studied as a form of social behavior. Researchers do not observe it only through the question of humor, but also through its effects on bonding, trust, coordination and emotional regulation. Papers published by researchers connected with evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience emphasize that laughter can contribute to a sense of connectedness among people and that it does not appear exclusively as a response to a verbal joke. In social conversations, laughter often accompanies short comments, gestures, unexpected interruptions or moments of shared understanding that may seem banal from the outside, but have clear meaning within the group.
That is exactly why the student project at the University of Virginia is not only an exercise in podcast production. It stands at the intersection of the humanities, social sciences and media practice. On the one hand, students learn how to shape a story, choose interlocutors, write narration and edit sound. On the other hand, they enter a topic that requires an understanding of the psychology of emotions, nonverbal behavior and group dynamics. Bashammakh, who studies biology, admitted that he does not consider himself a particularly creative person and that he is used to science-oriented courses, but that precisely because of that this class interested him. Such a statement reveals one of the important values of the course: it enables students from different fields to experience research, writing and sound not as separate disciplines, but as connected ways of understanding the world.
Audio is, at the same time, an especially suitable medium for the topic of laughter. In written text, laughter can be described, but in a podcast it can be heard: the difference between a short nervous laugh, loud shared laughter or a restrained reaction carries meaning that is difficult to fully convey in words. Therefore, before choosing the style of their own projects, the students listened to podcast examples and learned how educational, narrative and humorous elements can be joined into a whole. Their episode was not supposed to be only an explanation of the psychology of laughter, but also a listening experience that shows the audience why sound is an important part of the story.
A course that treats podcasting as a serious form of writing
Writing with Sound was created as a course that does not treat the podcast as an incidental media format, but as a form of writing and artistic expression. Steph Ceraso, an associate professor of digital writing and rhetoric in the University of Virginia’s Department of English, designed the course after arriving at the university in 2016, and in the meantime it has become recognizable for the fact that students create original audio series during the semester. According to the student newspaper The Cavalier Daily, participants are divided into teams, develop episodes that combine narration, interviews and sound design, and ultimately create a podcast season intended for a broader audience, not only for the instructor and classmates in the classroom.
For the period from 2022 to 2025, Ceraso received the NEH Mayo Distinguished Teaching Professorship, a recognition connected to teaching work, and together with Piers Gelly she also leads the
Writing with Sound lecture series in the Department of English. That series, according to the university description, brings together authors, producers and critics from the world of podcasting and audio storytelling, with public lectures and workshops for students. Among the guests were people connected with well-known audio projects and podcast criticism, which shows that at the University of Virginia a broader educational and professional ecosystem is developing around sound and podcasts.
For Gelly, the final project is the central part of the course. He told the university portal that this very segment is his favorite because he can see where students take the topic. In the case of humor, that meant a transition from a brainstorming board full of possible directions to conversations with a doctoral student in social psychology and an attempt to turn a laboratory question into an episode that simultaneously informs and holds attention. Such a process resembles professional journalistic work: a topic is first opened broadly, then narrowed, then checked through conversations and sources, and finally shaped into a story that must have a clear rhythm, voice and meaning.
Why the student project matters beyond the classroom
A seemingly small story about a student podcast actually speaks about several larger changes in education and media. The first change is that writing is less and less understood exclusively as text on paper or on a screen. Writing for sound requires different decisions: a sentence must be clear when it is heard only once, transitions must guide the listener without visual supports, and the voices of interlocutors become part of the structure of the story. Students who learn this form of work simultaneously learn media literacy, because they better understand how the narratives they listen to every day in podcasts, radio programs and digital audio formats are created.
The second change is that scientific topics are increasingly being translated into publicly understandable stories. The psychology of laughter could remain closed in academic articles, methodological descriptions and laboratory analyses, but in a student podcast it becomes a topic that can be connected with children’s humor, inside jokes, friendships, discomfort and everyday conversations. That does not mean that science is simplified to the level of entertainment, but that its questions are posed through formats that allow the audience to enter the topic. When students talk with researchers and then decide for themselves how they will structure an episode, they learn both responsibility toward facts and responsibility toward the audience.
The third change is connected with interdisciplinarity. In the same story appear the English language, rhetoric, podcast production, social psychology, biology, positive psychology and the study of emotions. Challa pointed out that she will study in Denmark next semester and deal with positive psychology, so the project about humor naturally connected with her personal academic plans. That detail shows how student projects can go beyond the boundaries of one course: a topic chosen for a final assignment can connect with future study, research interests and professional direction.
Humor as a serious topic without losing lightness
The most interesting part of this story may be precisely the paradox that humor must be taken seriously in order to understand why it works so lightly. Laughter appears quickly, often before a person consciously explains it, but complex processes can stand behind it: recognition of intention, assessment of relationships, a sense of safety, cultural codes, emotional contagion and the need to belong. In that sense, the University of Virginia student podcast does not try to give a final answer to the question of what is funny. Instead, it shows how such a question can be explored through conversation, sound and scientific context.
The project also reminds us that laughter is one of those topics that connect private and public experience. Everyone can recognize a moment in which a group of people laughs without a long explanation, but only closer observation reveals how much information such a moment carries. Who laughed first, who joined in, who remained silent, whether the laughter eased tension or confirmed closeness — all these are questions that in everyday life pass almost unnoticed. In the classroom, laboratory and podcast, they become material for analysis.
For the students involved in Gelly’s course, humor therefore became more than the theme of the semester. It became a way to test how academic research can be combined with storytelling, how sound can be used as evidence and atmosphere, and how a simple question can open toward a more complex picture of human behavior. Therein lies the broader value of the project as well: it shows that serious learning does not have to be separated from curiosity, play and laughter, but can begin precisely from them.
Sources:- University of Virginia Today – original text about the student podcast project, the Writing with Sound course and the study of humor (link)- University of Virginia, Writing and Rhetoric – description of the Writing with Sound Speaker Series and its organizers (link)- Emotion and Behavior Lab, University of Virginia – description of the laboratory’s research work on laughter, conversation, synchronization and social connections (link)- Department of Psychology, University of Virginia – profile of Adrienne Wood and description of research on social behavior, nonverbal cues and connection among people (link)- The Cavalier Daily – additional context about the Writing with Sound course, its creation and the production of student podcast series (link)- Royal Society Publishing – scientific paper on the role of laughter in the evolution of social bonding (link)- Frontiers in Psychology – scientific article on the social context and interpretation of laughter (link)
Find accommodation nearby