If I Were To Venture A Guess…

It has long been rumored that somewhere in a remote part of the world there survive at least a few remnants of a pack of laughing dogs. The existence of these dogs has never been conclusively proved (or so I am told), but what is purported to be the distant, haunting sound of their hysterical, congested laughter has been captured on tape and subjected to years of study and speculation.

The sound on these tapes, recorded late at night from the edge of a deep, dense forest, is of a creature –clearly amused– that sounds neither wholly human nor like any known animal.

For generations, natives of the region where these animals are said to live have passed down the legend that the laughing dogs are descendents of a dog that was created by God in the earliest days of the genesis of the world. God, it is surmised, originally intended to provide this dog with the gift of speech, and had given the beast the initial fundamentals necessary for forming words when He thought better of the idea and aborted the project, leaving the poor creature with nothing but a primitive voice box and the ability to form crude, guttural sounds.

Initially, as the story goes, the dog had been confused and embittered by this betrayal, and had sputtered and raged unintelligibly like a mute.

In time, however, this original dog had found a companion in the woods and had fallen in love. Together these animals –the one capable of producing sounds slightly more advanced than the barks and yaps of an average dog, and the other almost mute from loneliness– produced offspring that had for the most part inherited the dubious genetic gifts of the male.

The happiness experienced by this family of dogs (a family that over the years became a small community), and the pleasure and contentment they discovered in each other’s company, found expression in the laughter that eventually evolved from their stunted capacity for speech. It has been hypothesized that even those dogs that did not inherit the ability to produce the actual sounds of laughter learned to laugh along with the others by using nothing but their expressive eyes, nodding smiles, and innate talent for howling.

I have recently had an opportunity to hear the tapes of these purported laughing dogs, and though I am in no position to confirm the source of the sounds on these recordings, there is absolutely no mistaking what is being heard: Laughter. Joyous, uninhibited, full-throated laughter that ranges from a raspy, incredulous chuckle to a wild giggle to rollicking communal hysteria. It is a wonderful sound, and hearing it I have to imagine that even the most rational and humorless of scientists must be hard-pressed not to join in the laughter.

Having listened to this merriment, however, there is one question that continues to intrigue me, and it is apparently a question that holds little or no interest for the researchers: Just what the hell is it that those dogs find so damned funny?