Really love your thoughts here. Very thought-provoking to someone like myself who has spent quite a bit of time thinking about and researching the evolutionary origins of laughter and its relation to surprise/play

To respond to just one part:

> Bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny, but instead relies on attacking someone's status in front of a crowd. The crowd laughs in recognition of the successful attack, not because the joke is clever

I think you might have it inverted. The crowd doesn't laugh bc it's a successful attack. It's a successful attack bc they laugh.

The audience is largely voting with their choice of where they deploy their "social" laugh. Laughter used to be an involuntary hardwired animal sound (like a "moo"), that signaled a space of learning and safety, to explore and play. It attracted other primates to join on that merit. but along the way it became rewired into the software level of social context. Humans started deploying laughter to shape their social context: to flatter, to flirt, to charm, and yes, to hurt. This is why we laugh more and differently around other humans. (Some of this was discovered via dissecting muscles around the eyes, that activate most readily in more "true" involuntary Duchenne laughter, but not the contrived social laughter.)

So the laughing audience is complicit in the bullying. They are creating the weapon, and the attack. If it's actually funny, it just takes less work to get the audience on your side. That's the performance of bullying -- whether you can carry either a willing or unwilling audience along for the weaponising of the laughter.