A number of recent hypotheses have attempted to explain the ultimate evolutionary origins of laughter and humor. However, most of these have lacked breadth in their evolutionary frameworks while neglecting the empirical existence of two distinct types of laughter—Duchenne and non‐Duchenne—and the implications of this distinction for the evolution of laughter as a signal. Most of these hypotheses have also been proposed in relative isolation of each other and remain disjointed from the relevant empirical literature. Here we attempt to remedy these shortcomings through a synthesis of previous laughter and humor research followed by (i) a reevaluation of this research in light of theory and data from several relevant disciplines, and (ii) the proposal of a synthetic evolutionary