While we usually think of laughter as coming from an audience after a wisecrack from a single speaker, contrary to expectation, the speakers we observed laughed almost 50% more than their audiences. The study also showed that banal comments like, "Where have you been?" or "It was nice meeting you, too" -- hardly knee-slappers -- are far more likely to precede laughter than jokes. Only 10% to 20% of the laughter episodes we witnessed followed anything joke-like. Even the most humorous of the 1,200 comments that preceded laughter weren't necessarily howlers: "You don't have to drink, just buy us drinks!" and "Was that before or after I took my clothes off?." being two of my favorites. This suggests that the critical stimulus for laughter is another person, not a joke.