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Spend an evening at any game table and you will notice that most of the laughter has nothing to do with jokes. Someone draws the worst possible card. Someone’s clue in Codenames leads the whole team to the assassin. Someone confidently places a tile in the wrong spot and refuses to admit it. The social benefits of laughter are mostly about this kind, the shared, spontaneous kind, and the research suggests it does more for a group than almost anything else people do together.
This article covers what laughter seems to do to a group, why it matters for health and connection, and why games produce so much of it. The health claims around laughter are often oversold, so we will stick to what the research supports.
Why do people laugh together more than alone?
Because laughter is social before it is funny.
Robert Provine, a neuroscientist who studied laughter for decades by simply watching people in public, found that laughter was about 30 times more frequent in social settings than in solitary ones, and that only 10 to 20 percent of laughs followed anything resembling a joke; most followed ordinary remarks. Laughter, in his account, is a signal between people more than a response to comedy.
That reframes what is happening at a game table. The laughter when someone’s plan collapses in Pandemic is not a review of the comedy. It is the group saying, all at once, “we are in this together and it’s fine.” That is a remarkably useful thing for a group to be able to say without words.
What does the research suggest laughter does to a group?
Several things, and some of them show up in the body.
Bonding. Robin Dunbar’s lab at Oxford ran studies in which people watched comedy together and then had their pain thresholds measured, on the theory that endorphin release raises pain tolerance. Across six experiments published in 2011, people who laughed showed higher pain thresholds afterward, with a bigger effect when they watched in a group than alone, which the researchers interpreted as evidence that shared laughter triggers the same endorphin system involved in social bonding in other primates. Dunbar has argued that laughter may be a kind of grooming at a distance, letting humans bond in groups larger than one-on-one contact allows.
Trust and disclosure. A 2015 study led by Alan Gray at University College London, with Dunbar as a co-author, found that people who had just laughed went on to make more intimate personal disclosures than those who hadn’t, as judged by outside raters, though the participants themselves didn’t notice the difference. Laughter seems to lower the guard, which is why a group that has laughed through a game of Wavelength often finds itself in a real conversation afterward.
Stress. Mayo Clinic describes laughter as briefly activating and then cooling the stress response, with possible longer-term effects on stress hormones and mood that it flags as still being studied; the honest summary is that the direct effects look modest. The bigger stress effect probably comes indirectly: through the social connection that laughter builds, which the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory and Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s meta-analyses both tie to better long-term health.
Group cohesion. A 2012 meta-analysis of 49 workplace studies found that positive humor was associated with higher workgroup cohesion and better performance, and its authors cautioned that derogatory humor likely works differently.
What the research does not support: claims that laughter cures disease, replaces exercise, or has large direct effects on the immune system. Treat anything in that direction with skepticism. The reliable finding is about connection.
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Why do games produce so much laughter?
Because they manufacture the exact conditions that make people laugh: shared attention, mild stakes, surprise, and safe failure.
| Condition | Why it produces laughter | Game example |
|---|---|---|
| Shared attention | Everyone sees the same thing at the same moment | The whole table watching a Jenga tower lean |
| Mild stakes | Enough to care, not enough to hurt | Losing a round of The Crew |
| Surprise | The unexpected is the engine of humor | A terrible dice roll at the worst time |
| Safe failure | Failing in front of friends with no real cost | A disastrous Codenames clue |
| Permission to be silly | The rules say you have to | Acting out a word in Telestrations |
Different games hit different notes. Party games like Telestrations, Wavelength, and Just One are built almost entirely to produce laughter, and they’re the fastest way to get a stiff group loose. Cooperative games like The Crew and Pandemic produce the laughter of shared disaster, which bonds people faster than shared victory. Even quiet strategy games like Azul and Wingspan produce it, usually when someone realizes three turns too late what they should have done.
Social deduction games, like The Resistance or Blood on the Clocktower, produce a particular kind: the laughter of the reveal, when the person everyone trusted turns out to have been lying the whole time. Our piece on why social deduction games work goes into why that moment is so satisfying.
How do you get more of the good kind of laughter at your table?
Some of it you can set up.
- Open with something light. A ten-minute party game as the first thing on the table gets people laughing before the main event. It changes how the rest of the night goes.
- Choose games where failure is funny, not humiliating. Games that punish one player harshly produce silence. Games where the whole table fails together produce laughter. Cooperative games are reliable here.
- Laugh at the situation, not the person. The workplace research finds positive humor builds cohesion, and the people who study it warn that humor at someone’s expense is a different animal. Good hosts model this. “That card hates you” lands better than “you’re terrible at this.”
- Let the table talk. Some groups play in near silence to focus. That’s fine for a tournament. For a game night, the side conversation is where most of the laughter lives.
- Keep the same people coming back. Running jokes need a history. The fifth time the same friend gets the Ticket to Ride route that ruins everyone, it is funnier than the first. This is why standing game groups laugh more than one-off gatherings. See why game night memories last for more on that.
What does this mean for health?
The careful version: shared laughter is associated with stronger social bonds, and strong social bonds are associated, in a large body of research, with better health and longer life. Laughter is one of the mechanisms by which a group of acquaintances becomes a group of friends. It is not medicine, but it is part of how the social medicine gets made.
The LEV Institute, which the Ludarium works alongside, treats the weekly game night as a mental and social health practice, and shared laughter is one of the reasons it works. The game is the reason. The people are the point.
FAQ
What are the social benefits of laughter?
The research suggests shared laughter is associated with stronger bonding, higher trust, more personal disclosure, and better group cohesion. Dunbar’s work links it to the endorphin system involved in social bonding.
Does laughter reduce stress?
Modestly and in the short term, according to the research available, which is mixed in quality. The larger effect is probably indirect, through the social connection that laughter builds.
Why do we laugh more with friends than alone?
Robert Provine’s observational research found people laugh far more often in company and mostly in response to ordinary remarks, suggesting laughter is primarily a social signal rather than a reaction to jokes.
Which board games make people laugh the most?
Party games like Telestrations, Wavelength, Just One, and Codenames are built for it. Cooperative games like The Crew produce the laughter of shared failure, which bonds a group quickly.
Come laugh at our table
The Ludarium is building a place in Indianapolis where the laughter is loud and the games are good. New articles on play and health go to subscribers first. Subscribe to the Ludarium newsletter for new pieces on togethering for a lifetime.
Sources
- The Science of Laughter, Robert Provine, Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200011/the-science-of-laughter
- Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3267132/
- Laughter’s Influence on the Intimacy of Self-Disclosure, Human Nature: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-015-9225-8
- Stress relief from laughter? It’s no joke, Mayo Clinic: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress-relief/art-20044456
- Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, U.S. Surgeon General: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
- Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review, PLOS Medicine: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
- A meta-analysis of positive humor in the workplace, Journal of Managerial Psychology: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/02683941211199554/full/html
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