This article advocates regarding humour and laughter as embodied signs of the ancient, sympathetic, figurative mode of the human mind, still acting with us in dance, music, singing and literary activity. Starting from fixed evolutionary provisos, both the continuity and the departing lines between nonhuman vocalisations and human laughter are regarded. Along the Duchenne and non-Duchenne expression types, this article assays the developmental expansion of laughter, both social and cognitive, presumably under intricate imitative forms through millennia until the apparition of articulated languages. Then, it tries to clarify the special adhesion of humour and laughter to evolutionary achievements in the symbolic domain. Thus, from a cognitive and semiotic framework, it is claimed that the old signal of play and joy might have developed on a par with full connectivity and unbounded associations fostered by symbolic activity, clinging to novel meanings and skills, but still ruled by the conjoined social work of sanction and solidarity, a pattern that humour displays all over around. As a special reflex of ancient multimodality, laughter (with humour) appears related to participative, mythical modes of thinking that were in full force and effect at the beginning of human societies, rooted in metaphors and figurativeness. Since both humour and laughter still find their way in the modern contexts of free associations, human projections and expanded agentivity, they could be correctly regarded as the embodied, old counterpart of the imaginative dimension of symbolic activity.