people laughing right now

How this works (the honest bit). The frequency here is a commonly cited figure rather than a measurement we made: adults are generally reported to laugh somewhere between fifteen and twenty times a day, and each laugh is a burst of a few seconds rather than a state you stay in. We assume seventeen bursts of about three seconds. Because the bursts are so short, only a few million people are laughing at any instant - the daily total is enormous, the instantaneous number is small, and it flickers constantly. Laughter is also mostly social: people laugh far more with others than alone, and rarely at anything that would look like a joke written down. Every figure on this page is a model built from population data, each country's local clock and the assumptions above. It is an estimate, it moves every second, and at least one of them is certainly true.