If you study humor you find that nothing is funny and every joke is actually mean. I’ll look for these laughter studies but iirc the conclusions are that people laugh as a form of group identification. Laughter serves as a social signal in the same way affirmative or roger does over a radio. As in, I have received the information you have transmitted and correctly understand the intended message. As social groups become more specialized or valuable, it becomes more important to the groups survival to weed out those who are not of the proper pre-requisites. Academia is a perfect example of this, and what I find most fascinating is the etymology of the word barbarian. The word coming from an onomatopoeia of what athians thought foreignors sounded like when attempting to speak greek. I can just imagine eletist Greeks making fun of people behind their back as a form of social solidarity.