Sophie Scott

But it can be a way that some people will laugh to deal with sometimes with situations that are quite serious.

When Roger, I'm going to say his name wrong, that man at Fox who had been a serial harasser of female colleagues, they made the film Bombshell about it.

And then in 2016, lots of women started to tell their stories.

And he had quite a formal way of sort of propositioning women.

And the number of women who said when he propositioned them that they'd laughed was

And they were laughing to try and de-escalate that situation to say, I know you don't mean it.

I know that you're just kidding.

And to give him a plausible out, like I was just messing around.

But of course he can say, oh, they're laughing.

They're fine.

They're enjoying it.

There's a real complexity there that people's interpretation of laughter is as important as the intention somebody has with their laugh.

It can be something that people will also use to try and cover up other things that are more serious.

Lie to you, for example, and use the laughter as a sort of cloak to say, well, none of this matters.

This is all just fun.

So definitely that's possible.

And I think it's like a hall of mirrors, laughter.

The complexity of it in terms of both why it's being produced

and how it is perceived is very, very non-fixed.

Just because you want to laugh to be interpreted in a positive way doesn't mean to say somebody necessarily will do so.