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The Laughing Ape is a newsletter about the ridiculous things suit-wearing apes do, and the lies we tell ourselves to avoid admitting we’re doing them.

Holy people have sinful thoughts, supermodels take nasty dumps and my Uncle Russell is not in “a better place.” It’s the stuff we evolved to laugh at: the screws that stay loose, our absurd performances, hidden motives, status games, the asinine things we care about, and the strange rituals by which we try to convince ourselves we are more important than we actually are.

This newsletter is about evolution, self-deception, humor, social class, academia, teaching, and family life. Life is serious business. But this substack is mostly about taking ourselves less seriously.

I’m a biological anthropologist and writer. I trained under the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers at Rutgers, and later worked with Napoleon Chagnon, who spent more than a decade living with the Yanomamö in the Amazon. I’m also working on a book called That’s Not Funny: How America Lost Its Sense of Humor, about comedy, taboos, moral panics, and why a culture that can’t laugh at itself becomes more fragile, dishonest, and less free.

The basic idea is that humor isn’t just entertainment. It is one of the ways human beings break the spell of self-importance. Good jokes let us glimpse ourselves from the outside — if only for a second — not as the heroic, rational, self-assured creatures we imagine ourselves to be, but as confused, status-obsessed, self-deceiving primates just trying to make it through the day.

Some essays here are explicitly about humor. Most aren’t. But they all circle the same questions: Why do people care so much what other people think? Why are we so easily humiliated? Why are certain words, jokes, and rituals sacred or forbidden? Why do smart people believe stupid shit? And why are human beings, even at our most serious, so reliably ridiculous?

If you’re new here, these are good places to start.

Three essays about downward mobility, humiliation, teaching, credentials, and the strange ways people find out where they actually stand.

1. I Was Wearing a Tutu When I Started Bragging About My PhD

2. I Was a Scientist. Then I Became a Substitute Teacher

3. What an Eighth Grader Who Drew a Penis on My 510-Million-Year-Old Fossil Taught Me About Status

How Anthropology Lost Interest in the People It Was Founded to Understand — On Napoleon Chagnon, the American Anthropological Association, and what happens when a field built to understand human beings thinks it already knows everything about them.

These are the essays closest to the book itself: on the biology of laughter, American comedy, taboo, and why humor is one of the best ways human beings tell the truth without admitting that’s what they’re doing.

1. How America Lost Its Sense of Humor

2. Why Is Funny?

3. Chapter 3: What Is Funny?

The Forgotten Virtue — An essay about money, virtue, self-control, my mom and the old-fashioned idea that wanting less might be one of the last real forms of freedom.

Everyone Knows Soccer is Boring — An essay about why soccer is such a poorly designed sport, why it sucks to watch, and why so many people pretend it isn’t.

If any of this sounds interesting, subscribe. If you’ve already subscribed, thanks for reading. And if you know someone who’d like this kind of thing, send them one of the essays.