“It is impossible for you to be angry and laugh at the same time. Anger and laughter are mutually exclusive and you have the power to choose either.”
Wayne Dyer

“Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human makeup, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”
Victor Frankl- Man’s Search for Meaning

One of my first assignments as a new therapist was to go out “into the community” to work, which I quickly found out was code for working with people who were a different color than me. Arriving at work my first day, I found that my task was to conduct an anger management seminar with recently released convicts who were living in a halfway house. My training lasted exactly one hour, and then it was my turn to talk to these guys about how to nurture their inner children. It was a terrifying ordeal.

I started out with the manual, which came complete with faces that identified different emotions. There was a smiley face for happy, a face with a single tear for sad, and so on. Looking around the room and seeing the stone cold faces, which included murderers, look at this handout in stunned silence was a troubling reality, and quickly I understood that this gig was going to require me to think much more quickly on my feet.

So I started with a story about me on a bike. In this story I was riding full speed on the sidewalk on the north side of Chicago, when, seemingly out of nowhere, a block of cement about 2 feet tall rose out of the sidewalk. It was too late for me to slow down, and as I careened into the cement, I saw my whole life flash before my eyes as I flipped over my handlebars. While I was in midair I spotted a little girl holding an ice cream cone standing with her mother. Quickly calculating the physics of the situation while I was in flight, I realized it was inevitable that I would in fact fly directly into them.

What happened next was where the line between comedy and tragedy got blurred. I crashed into the little girl and the ice cream cone went flying right out of her hand. As I lay there bleeding I spotted her out of the corner of my eye. Saw the single tear fall down her face and the sadness give way to anger as she sized up the situation.

What I didn’t see coming was what happened next. The little girl turned her angry eyes on me, and, like an angry bull, began her charge. She ran over to me and kicked me in the shin with all of the power her little legs could muster. It was so painful yet so comical I had to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it.

So that was my story. I sat that for a moment in silence as they digested it, and then I saw a smile, followed by a chuckle, and soon everyone in the room was laughing heartily. It was a formula that had never failed me. Share my personal misfortune with others and watch the room go wild. In this case I wanted to make a point however, and thought about how I could use this moment of levity to at least begin a discussion about managing anger.

And it worked! By showing them I was also prone to losing my temper, stupidity, road rage, and all of the other pitfalls of modern living that they were, I had diffused the power dynamic in the room and we were able to start a real conversation about anger.

In getting to know the guys, I was continually amazed at how thoughtful and intelligent they were about talking about their own lives, and all of my preconceived notions about what a “convict” was supposed to act like soon went out the window. In learning about their lives, I found out that most of them had terrible family experiences as young kids, and how they often had to affiliate with gangs to find a sense of belonging. I heard stories about abuse, rape, violence, and even torture that sometimes made me sick to my stomach. It was difficult enough to get them to talk about these things, let alone incorporating a lesson about the healing power of laughter. A few weeks in, I had gotten them talking, but was far from converting any of these things into any meaningful life lessons.

So I decided to improvise. I brought in a copy of Man’s search for meaning, and we took turns reading passages from it. For those not familiar with the book, it’s about a doctor who loses absolutely everything while imprisoned in a concentration camp, including his business, his home, and his family, including his wife. The book is his account of how he was able to maintain hope and create meaning in the most horrific place imaginable. It had been a valuable part of my own development, and my wish was that some of these same lessons would resonate with the guys.

I was especially interested in Frankl’s descriptions of how laughter somehow persisted in the camps, which seemed almost unbelievable to comprehend. He described the desire to laugh as something that lies deep inside the human heart that nothing can touch or take way.

So as we read I asked the guys to tell me about how they were able to maintain their senses of humor while they were imprisoned. What followed were some of the funniest things I’ve ever heard, and I learned that necessity was truly the mother of invention. While they were relating these stories I couldn’t help but think about the quote from Wayne Dyer at the beginning of this story about how laughter and anger are incompatible emotional states. The fact was that many of these men did have a great deal of anger, and in many cases the only way they had ever expressed this anger was through violence. Continuing to explore how to respond to emotional arousal with laughter instead of anger was a difficult lesson, and one I had certainly not mastered in my own life.

One of the tasks of my job was to help guide the guys through their transition back to work, back with their families, and in general back into society. Every week we would take a scenario and see if we could identify both an angry as well as a humorous response to the situation. Every week I would also bring my own scenarios in as well, most of which occurred while I navigated Chicago’s public transportation system, which was an area of my life where my own anger management skills were woefully lacking. As always, I continued to hold my own life up to public ridicule, which never failed to delight.

What I learned, and what I hoped the guys learned, was that one of the key lessons about managing anger could be realized by learning how to not take things personally, and understand, in real time, how to really process the idea of another person’s context. The fact is our emotions get aroused when others challenge us, threaten us, or even slightly disrespect us, but really it says much more about them than it does about us when they make this choice. This is a difficult concept to comprehend, particularly when your very life depends on your survival skills, and one of the key ideas we discussed was adapting from one context to another while continually working on not taking things personally.

This came up in their lives in a number of ways. Many of them worked in retail jobs, where impatient customers would disrespect them or otherwise address them without even basic courtesy. One question we tried to integrate into our class was asking, “what problem is the person trying to solve?” and then again trying to come up with answers that may provide alternate explanations for difficult behavior.

By the end of my year there, I realized I had not only been though a significant teaching experience, but also a wonderful learning experience. I saw men who had previously drawn guns at the slightest hint of agitation use humor to diffuse difficult situations. Saw quiet guys blossom into class clowns as they learned to write down and consider alternate choices in different scenarios in their lives. It was an incredibly gratifying experience, and one I will truly never forget, as it taught me that anyone could potentially learn to use laughter to cope with the difficult situations in their lives.

The impact of my time there didn’t really hit home with me till a couple of weeks ago when I was riding a bus downtown in a very agitated mood. A couple of people bumped into me, and I let out an audible sigh as each person encroached a little further into my space. A minute later I heard someone yell,

“Hey doc!” I heard as I looked around and saw Brian, one of my prize pupils from my time as the anger management instructor.

“Yea?” I responded.

“What problem are you trying to solve,” he said as a huge smile broke across his face. And I had to laugh as well. The student had become the teacher, and it was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment in time. I laughed about it the rest of the day, and now when I am experiencing transportation rage, I try and picture that smile and his words continue to ring in my ears, and I invariably begin to laugh. Physician heal thyself I think is the appropriate expression.

Why in the world are we here?
Surely not to live in pain and fear
Who in the world do you think you are?
A superstar? Well right your are
Well we all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun
John Lennon

If you had one song to let the lord know about how you felt about your time here on earth, what would it be?
Sam Phillips to Johnny Cash

Heading out to New York City this week to see a truly wonderful friend of mine. We’ve got big plans. Going to check out the Dakota hotel and Strawberry fields in central park to pay tribute to my all-time favorite musician, John Lennon. Gonna drink some great beer in Brooklyn and then dine on some old world Italian food. We’ve got plans to do Manhattan, and hit a Yankees game and do al kinds of other fun stuff as well.

Why do I bring this up? Because all week I’ve been so excited about this trip, and it reminded me of something that is beginning to crystallize for me about how I want to spend the rest of my time here. This feeling that I have can best be described as unbridled enthusiasm, and as I get older I’ve become more and more convinced that it is the key to a successful life.

That is a platitude, I understand that, and many wise men will tell you persistence, or hard work, or a million other things are the key to life, and I agree that all of those things are important. Without a sense of enthusiasm and passion for the choices you have made however, all of these other traits are essentially a part of a fool’s errand.

The thing about enthusiasm is it isn’t some mystical quality that we are born with or that we are somehow inherently possessed with. It’s a choice to say yes to things in our lives in every circumstance. Sure it’s easy to say yes to life when we are taking exotic vacations and traveling around the world, but more and more I’ve become convinced that enthusiasm is at least as important in the circumstances in life that are less than ideal.

Which brings us back to the idea of choice. There have been so many times in my life where my happiness has come down to a choice I made about the kind of attitude I brought to the table. I’ve always been a bit of a stranger to hard work, and I have sulked and whined and pouted about all kinds of situations in my life that really weren’t that bad when I looked back on them in retrospect. Having worked and studied in a number of different organizations, I have noticed that it is almost a universal truth that people like to complain about the way things are run. Although this can be a way of bonding with your fellow comrades, it can also become a more permanent part of your attitude that begins to seep into other areas of your life.

Which is what happened to me. As a student I had developed an extra large chip on my shoulder, and became convinced that everyone who was trying to teach me something was being condescending. It was a time in my life where I had a difficult time ceding power to other people, as I had usually been the person in charge as opposed to the one at the bottom of the totem pole. Although it has taken me many years to come to this realization, I finally learned that sometimes it’s a lot less about whose in charge and a lot more about who commands respect by giving respect, and that sometimes the only way to gain power is by ceding it to others first.

On this note, a fellow student and supervisor of mine gave me this advice from Charles Swindoll about the importance of attitude. This also sits on my wall as a constant reminder that I always have a choice in the matter,

ATTITUDE
by: Charles Swindoll

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.

Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude… I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.

And so it is with you… we are in charge of our attitudes.

Even as I read this today I have to remind myself to think about the application of what he advises. I still find little ways to complain in my life all the time, and staying vigilant about my attitude is a daily exercise in mindfully paying attention to the ways I let my mine wander into more pessimistic places. As always humor is an amazing asset in this regard, and when I forget this I take a look on my wall and heed the words of mister Swindoll. It reminds me to stay enthusiastic about even the most mundane of tasks, as today’s toil slowly adds up to something much more rewarding.

More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse.
~Doug Larson

At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.
Jean Houston

I have counseled all kinds of people in my life. From very young children barely able to talk, to 100 year-old people on their deathbeds, I have been in situations where I tried to provide comfort and understanding to people regardless of the circumstances of their lives. Because I have so many weaknesses, it’s hard to single out one, but as far as a counseling specialty, I’ve always found it a little difficult to work with couples. The anger and hostility that seeps into a marriage can be hard to sit with, and resolving intense conflict can at times run contrary to my “lighten up” approach to life. Therefore it came as a particular shock to me when one couple pulled me aside a while back and told me I was a pretty humorless person.

To back up a second, I had been working with this particular couple for a while, and had been trying to summon a character trait called “gravitas” which describes a kind of personal seriousness that I was told in graduate school that I was sorely lacking. The implication was, that although a sense of humor is ostensibly a good quality in a therapist, people need to know that you are taking their problems very seriously.

I’m not convinced this is correct, as I have often found that people are taking their problems entirely too seriously. The challenge as a therapist is knowing when it’s time to simply listen, and when it’s time to challenge people’s views of the world that appear to be contributing to their problems.

In this particular case, I did a lot of listening at first, but over time as I perceived their comments towards each other as more hostile, I would interrupt more and suggest an intervention that I thought would improve their communication patterns. Often times in these situations they would stop and look at each other kind of inquisitively, without offering much feedback as to what they thought of my suggestions. I would often leave the sessions feeling both confused as well as frustrated, and after several weeks of this I decided it was important to ask them what they thought was going on.

I wasn’t ready for what happened next. They came in to the next session, exchanged embarrassed glances at each other, and began with the ominous, “we need to talk,” before I was able to get started. I have heard this expression a number of times in my life, mostly from women in the exact context you would expect. I braced myself for the inevitable bad news, when I was greeted with a rather surprising confession. The husband Daryl began;

“Well Joe, this is awkward, but Denise and I have been talking, and, well, you told us to tell you if you were doing something we don’t like, so here goes. You’re a little too serious for us, and we both are getting a little irritated by how you turn every exchange into some kind of life lesson. Sometimes we like to bicker back and forth in a funny way. That’s what we do. That’s what kind of works about our marriage, and frankly you are getting to be kind of a buzz kill.”

I had been slammed into the dunk tank. ME??? A buzz kill?? I was the guy with the lampshade on his head at every party. I was the lighten up guy. This couldn’t be true!!

“Well guys, I have to tell you this is a first, and I promise you I will think a lot about what you said,” I explained. “Our challenge here is to find what does and doesn’t work about your marriage, and trust me when I say there is no bigger advocate for humor in a marriage than me.”

Even as these words came out of my mouth I felt like a fraud. I thought I was sending that message, but perhaps I wasn’t at all. How many other couples had I seen that I had made the same mistake with? I realized that their bringing it up provided an opportunity though, and I vowed to go home and think of some ways I could help them with their marriage without coming across as a prep school dean.

While thinking about this, I went back to what I considered to be one of the best books ever written on the subject, The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work, by John Gottman. In particular I focused on a chapter that dared to contradict a longstanding belief in couples counseling that almost every problem could be solved with the proper amount of active listening and communication skills.

But his research showed that this simply wasn’t the case. He instead found that many problems in marriages were not solvable, and that some beliefs, values, and habits were too deeply entrenched to be receptive to change. The key he suggested, was to develop an understanding of which of your problems were solvable and which ones were not.

I have come to believe that what lies in the middle of this valley is how receptive a couple is to using humor. What drives us crazy about other people is often at least a partial reflection of some part of our own psychological baggage, and we begin to develop wisdom when we come to understand and acknowledge there are things about ourselves that also trigger these responses in others. By admitting these things we can take away some of their power, and by laughing at them we can potentially diffuse resentment and defensiveness before they begin to stir.

In the case of the Robinsons we reached a whole new cruising altitude when the three of us began to incorporate humor into our sessions, and in doing so we began to identify which of their problems could be solved and which ones couldn’t. We found for instance that no matter how much Daryl wanted her to be interested in his gadgets and hobbies, she simply was not inclined in this direction. We also agreed that in the realm of spirituality, the two of them were on a fundamentally different page, and that no amount of insisting on Denise’s part was going to change Daryl’s mind about going to church on Sundays.

Although these things may seem insignificant to a neutral observer, they often gave rise to very intense arguments that descended into some very hurt feelings. What was at the root of this stuff were feelings that the other person didn’t care about things that were very important to them. As is the case with many arguments, what looked like anger was actually hurt, although this hurt manifested itself in harsh words and personal attacks. Because this couple was already so good at using humor in their interactions, we began to clarify rules of engagement around issues we put in the “unsolvable” problem category. Although this couple already had a solid foundation, coming to understand this idea, and using the appropriate humor to discuss these things really helped them turn a corner.

6 months after they had terminated their therapy, I received a package from them. Fearing the worst, I opened it slowly, and then laughed out loud when I saw it was a Mexican whoopee cushion they had purchased on a trip they had taken for their second honeymoon. The attached card read, “Doc, hope you haven’t forgotten about us and that you are doing well. We saw this and thought of you. Keep your sense of humor. Always keep your sense of humor.”

And that whoopee cushion still sits on my desk today. It serves as a little reminder that when things do get too serious I can slide it under someone’s chair and lighten the mood a little bit. More importantly I made a point to consistently monitor my own temperament. It was a lesson I won’t soon forget.

The idea of laughter clubs began in India in 1995 when a doctor named Madan Kataria went down to his local park and began laughing. Soon a few others joined him, and within a couple of days 50 people had begun laughing along within him. Kataria had read hundreds of articles about the healing powers of humor, and set out to explore the question if there was any real difference in the body between laughing at things people found naturally funny, and simply laughing for the sake of laughing.

Kataria’s research and his own experiences soon convinced him that the body’s immune system was unable to distinguish between the two. Kataria’s wife, a yoga teacher, soon added to her husband’s discovery, and added Yoga and breathing exercises to her husband’s laughter exercises, and their collaboration would pave the way for the creation of laughter clubs, which now number more than 5,000 around the world.
So it was with great eagerness that I attended my first laughter club in a cozy little setting not far from my home, but even still I was very nervous as I wondered if I would be able to just laugh for no reason without something actually being funny. I thought back to my days working as an activity director at a nursing home where the things I said while trying to be funny were often met with blank stares, and how the things I said in seriousness often resulted in gales of laughter from my audience. This thought alone got me laughing at myself, and when I met the director of the club Alex, I knew I would immediately find something to laugh about.
Alex was one of those guys whose very presence makes people laugh. He is one of those people who look like they are on the verge of laughing at all times, and being in his presence was a contagious force that I was quickly taken with. After a few minutes of good-natured bantering he introduced me around, and I was a little taken aback when people would burst out laughing simply from me introducing myself, and couldn’t help but wonder if they were all in on some joke that at my expense. Soon I discovered their secret however, and it was one I had experienced often in my own life, and that is, simply, that laughter begets laughter. Much like how seeing someone yawn often spreads an epidemic of yawning, laughing had the same effect, and soon I was in the middle of this wonderful crowd right in the heart of the action. Often in my life my jokes are met with polite courtesy laughs and then people politely excusing themselves, but in this room I cold do no wrong. Seeing how easily these people burst into real deep down belly laughs was inspiring, and at the end of the hour, I felt more energized than I had in quite some time.
What had happened to me? Although I enjoy laughing very much, I had a hard time remembering how many times in my life I could truly remembering laughing at something so hard that I literally couldn’t stop, but the times I did remember were some of the happiest of my life. Yet these people seemed to turn it on and off so naturally and I was baffled at how they did this so easily. After the session was over I spoke with Alex and heard some amazing stories. Many of the people in attendance that day were cancer survivors, some had experienced horrible childhood trauma, while still others had recently been through a divorce or some other major recent loss. I thought surely when I looked around that I was the most messed up person there, but after hearing Alex talk I reconsidered. The main point I took away from our conversation that day was that it was not what had happened to them in their lives, but how they chose to live afterwards that mattered, which is something I had of course heard during my academic studies but had rarely seen any real life examples of.
I left that day a true believer in the power of the laughter club, and plan to return often whenever I feel I am in need of an energizing workout, as the exercise I got that day was more than I had gotten in months. That whole next week I thought about what I had seen and done that day, and often found myself chuckling for no reason at all thinking of some silly little thing I had remembered. My experience that day had left me wanting more, and I was now reawakened to the everyday silliness of life that exists everywhere if we just take a little time to recognize it. I promised myself I would never again be “too busy” to see it, and penciled in the time slot at the laughter club as a new weekly activity.

Here is a link where you can find a laughter club in your neighborhood, enjoy!!!
http://www.worldlaughtertour.com/sections/clubs/index.asp

In the midst of winter, I finally found there was within me an invincible summer-

Albert Camus

In 1996 I moved to Chicago to fulfill a lifelong dream to perform as a comedian. With this in
mind, I enrolled in classes at the world famous Second City, and within a few months had performed in a couple of shows around the city, it was the least funny time in my life. What I hadn’t counted on was the “business” side of comedy that eventually reared its ugly head, and soon, in the midst of this environment, I found a great deal of the joy and enthusiasm I had for making people laugh had slowly disappeared. Still I soldiered on, and along the way met some very funny people, who, like myself, were also deeply flawed. It was during this period of my life when I truly began to understand the relationship between comedy and pain as I continued to observe my fellow performers, along with hearing anecdotes about former Second City stars like John Belushi and Chris Farley. This relationship between comedy and pain would eventually be the basis of my first book http://www.amazon.com/Tragic-Clowns-Analysis-Belushi-Farley/dp/1427616132/ref=sr_1_1/104-5135849-7781532?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184376491&sr=1-1
Eventually I left this little world in Chicago, and took a job working as an entertainer in a nursing home where I was quickly assigned to the Alzheimer’s unit. I was making 8 dollars an hour, driving a shitty car, and living in an apartment without hot water, it was the happiest time of my life.
Working with seniors and making them laugh in the last days of their lives was an incredibly powerful experience, and soon the joy that originated from the power of laughter was back in my life. Although the job was often very difficult, the little moments throughout the day where I was able to bring someone back from the brink of despair with some silly gesture made it all worthwhile. It was while working this job that I came to an amazing conclusion; laughter can save lives.
Now I understand this is an extraordinary claim, and my own personal evidence was to this point based primarily on a few observations, but I knew I has witnessed something very powerful. Suddenly people who hadn’t spoken in years were laughing and singing and dancing, and people who otherwise laid in bed all day were now eagerly getting up in the morning.
Lest I take full credit for getting these people out of bed, I want to make clear that it was not myjokes that were creating these changes, but simply the act of laughing itself. Although these people’s memories had in many ways failed them, the stimulation they received from the physical act of laughing created changes that were clearly visible. The communal act of getting people together and simply laughing is utterly contagious, and despite their cognitive deficits, it was my experience that they still had a deep rooted desire to share in the laughter. Soon we were spending afternoons sitting in a circle sharing stories, and inevitably someone would begin laughing, often when it was at an utterly inappropriate point in the conversation. Soon the stories would end, and the laughter would spread throughout the room like a virus. During my first few weeks nurses would often come running into the room, sure that something was horribly wrong. I had disrupted their peace and quiet and also challenged their idea that these patients were “too far gone” to experience joy. Soon they were also on board however, unable to resist the contagiousness of unbridled silliness.
Eventually I would write a book about my experiences working with Alzheimer’s patientshttp://www.amazon.com/Stories-Courage-Experiences-Alzheimers-Disease/dp/1427616140/ref=sr_1_6/104-5135849-7781532?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184376331&sr=1-6
and looking back this was the happiest time of my life. Although I had come to Chicago to work as a comedian, I had found something infinitely more valuable through using the power of laughter to serve other people. This experience set me on a path to discover just what it was about laughter that was so powerful, and this is a journey I will continue to follow for the rest of my life. In conducting this research I have heard some truly amazing stories, and have also continued to conduct my own experiences in some highly unusual places. These stories and my continuing research will be the basis of this blog, and I hope these stories will inspire others to share their own stories about the healing power of laughter.

The Fiddler of Dooney

WHEN I play on my fiddle in Dooney,

Folk dance like a wave of the sea;

My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,

My brother in Moharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:

They read in their books of prayer;

I read in my book of songs

I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time,

To Peter sitting in state,

He will smile on the three old spirits,

But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,

Save by an evil chance,

And the merry love the fiddle

And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,

They will all come up to me,

With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’

And dance like a wave of the sea.

Eventually I stopped working with seniors as I returned to school full time to become a
psychologist. I had thoroughly enjoyed working in a service capacity, and my time with the elderly energized me to want to do more. Wanting to learn more about the healing power of laughter, I enrolled in a doctoral program where I soon found some very somber people. I soon learned that many psychologists are fixated on arguing the merits of a particular psychological orientation, and many in fact spend a lifetime arguing minor differences in approaches to psychotherapy that eventually swallows up their entire academic career. I was determined not to fall into this trap, and found refuge in a few very funny professors, (of which there are many) who seemed to grasp that psychology can and should have an element of playfulness, fun, and even joy.

During this early period of my academic career I took a job as a tutor in a very bad neighborhood in Chicago, hoping that I could bring some of the same approaches to working with the elderly to another difficult population. The first week there they ate me alive, but gradually I earned their trust. Many of these kids came from homes where abuse and neglect was rampant, and these repeated betrayals by people in authority had left them with very little respect for people in positions of power. As is probably the case with many teachers, the ones that misbehaved the most were immediately my favorites, and I found myself amused with their antics while also understanding i was supposed to be the one in charge. I was told to “show them whose boss” by my supervisor, who was a firm believer in the power of discipline, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to take this approach.

By the second week I had made some progress, but still had a difficult time keeping everyone focused. The kids loved to run around, chase each other, and generally be moving all the time, and I realized that to come up with some kind of effective lesson I would have to incorporate all of these things into my program. We began a “tell a funny story” exercise that was immediately a big hit. The kids would tell a story about going to the zoo or Wrigley Field, or to Navy Pier, and soon these became little history lessons where we snuck in a little learning as we were sharing stories. As we got to know each other better, even the most reticent children were now joining in on the fun, and soon the entire group was laughing and talking, and once again I witnessed the contagious power of laughter.

My supervisor was less then thrilled at my approach, as our program was part of a “No Child Left Behind” program with a strict curriculum that she felt needed to be followed. From my experiences working with these kids, it was apparent that despite any math or reading we could teach them, in their relationships with others,and in life, they were truly being left behind. Somehow in the midst of focusing on grades and progress we had forgotten we were raising human beings, some of who were in intense pain from years of abuse.

A surprising fact about psychology is that it is not in fact a psychologist’s theoretical orientation or their years of experience that is the most powerful predictor of psychological growth in therapy, but instead the quality of the relationship formed between the client and the therapist. Could this same thing be true for children in a classroom? I certainly thought so, and soon I became very close to a number of my students as we continued to share our stories. Eventually the big day came for the students to take their test to determine if they complied with the standards set by “No child left Behind.” My supervisor, who was responsible for three other classes besides mine, was especially worried that my class had made no progress over the three months we had been together, and let me know it on every occasion she could find.

When the results finally came back, I was surprised as anyone to see that my kids had raised their pre and post test scores higher than any of the other classes at the school. Although we had not followed the curriculum, I had constantly encouraged them, laughed with them, and made them feel like they were important to me, and building this relationship had awakened something inside of them. The famous Adlerian psychologist Rudolph Dreikurs once remarked that “children need encouragement like plants need water” and I saw firsthand how true this lesson really was. Once again I had seen how the power of laughter and encouragement could change lives, and I was now more convinced than ever that this lesson needed to be talked about even more.

Having now experienced this powerful lesson of how laughter heals a second time, I felt it was time to do some further research into who else knew this wonderful approach. One excellent article I found early on was called “Laugh, Teacher, Laugh” by Glen Walter, and this article confirmed for me what I eventually discovered many teachers already knew, that, as Walters put it, “Education is too important to be taken seriously.”

Walter’s article talked in detail about the chemical changes in the body that occur as a result of laughter, some of which include lower blood pressure, a boost to the endocrine and immune systems, and a release of endorphins which are the body’s wonderful natural pain killers usually associated with the “runner’s high” experienced by people who exercise.The following are a list of Walter’s recommendations for using laughter in the classroom,

1. Share humorous events from your own experience.
2. Learn to appreciate class clowns. They are your greatest ally when it comes to laughter and can brighten even the grayest of days.
3. Obtain humorous books from your library and read them to your class.
4. Talk about funny shows or movies you have enjoyed.
5. Have your students find humorous stories and pictures in newspapers and magazines.
6. Have students write and act out a funny class story or play.
7. Laugh at your own mistakes instead of making an excuse or covering up.
8. Wear a funny hat, clown’s nose, two different kinds of shoes, or colored socks to school, anything to break the routine.
9. Finally, commit yourself to developing a humorous outlook on life. Take yourself, life, and school less seriously. Laugh at the stressors of the days. Your laughter will help eliminate the dreaded tunnel vision and may even help you say, “School is too important to take seriously.”

The simplicity yet brilliance of this advice has served me well, and I hope others will see it and pass it on.

Although Dr. Kataria, the creator of laughter Yoga and others like him have shown that the act of laughter itself is therapeutic, it is also useful to explore the different kinds of humor styles and how these styles affect our interactions with others.

Through my work in the schools I learned that, although kids love to laugh, there can also an element of this laughter that is at the expense of smaller and weaker children. This idea has certainly been around long before I myself was getting wedgies from other children, and bullying is in fact one of the most destructive forces in the educational system.

At the root of bullying may be the intense need to belong, which psychologists like Alfred Adler thought was one of our most primal and powerful instincts. Kids quickly learn that the class clowns receive more attention than other children, and this sends a powerful and conflicting message. Somewhere in our early socialization we find that, although we are trained to respect and listen to the teacher, there is one of them who doesn’t look and talk much like we do, and 30 people about our size whose opinions of us quickly becomes much more powerful than the lone teacher.

So we quickly learn to use laughter to become closer to the rest of these people we suddenly find ourselves together with. Often this laughter gets directed at the kids that are the most different, and laughter becomes a powerful tool of conformity that may be used to distance ourselves from those that don’t belong.

So how do we teach healthy laughter then becomes the question. It has been my observation that laughter becomes a kind of wisdom when we learn to make a joke at our expense as part of a larger pattern of laughing at the absurdity of the human condition. Pretty heady stuff to teach a second grader grader, but within this idea there lies a powerful understanding of the world. Communal laughter implies thoughtful realization, that I like you, have things happen that are out of my control. Laughter involves choosing to view these things with a kind of passive volition that implies an understanding of how chaotic this shared voyage we are on can really be, and when we come to realize this we have turned a significant corner in our own growth and maturity.

The idea of humor styles has also been written about by Louise Dobson (2006) who contributed a wonderful piece to Psychology Today on this very subject. Dobson begins by talking about how humor was initially thought to be an indication of aggression. This idea fits well with the kind of humor that is often used in bullying, and this kind of humor intersects when people have found a way to combine their anger and their need to belong in a way that uses humor to build themselves up while tearing others down. Dobson talks about how someone like Ann Coulter represents someone who often uses this kind of humor, and hearing her mock presidential candidate John Edward’s deceased son, this certainly seems to be the case. People like herself and Rush Limbaugh have built their entire reputations from mocking and taunting others, and one can make a guess that these behaviors may be a compensation for maladaptive behaviors regarding humor they learned early on in life.

Another category Dobson refers to as “self-hating” humor, and she lists Chris Farley and John Belushi, as examples of this kind of humor, a subject I wrote about at length in my book The Tragic Clowns http://www.amazon.com/Tragic-Clowns-Analysis-Belushi-Farley/dp/1427616132/ref=sr_1_1/104-5135849-7781532?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184888374&sr=1-1
This kind of humor is also closely related to patterns developed in childhood, as kids who are picked on learn to make fun of themselves before others have a chance to. Many of the world’s great comedians in fact honed their comedy skills through this socialization pattern, as they became so adroit and entertaining others through mocking themselves that they eventually became famous for it. Farley was the classic example of this, and this pattern eventually permeated every other phase of his life to the point where he completely self-destructed.
The next category Dobson refers to as “Bonding Humor” and this is the kind of healthy humor I earlier referred to as “communal” which implies a shared understanding of the comedy of our shared humanity. This kind of humor is also at the root of the power of the laughter clubs, as they provide a place to leave worries at the door and participate in a moment of unconditional, shared joy with their fellow human beings. So how do we “teach” this kind of humor, and is this lesson worthwhile? I believe and contend that communal laughter is something people deeply desire to be a part of from the very beginning of life. Returning to the idea of the power of “belonging,” perhaps if we emphasized the power of laughter that promotes belonging before the powers of socialization preverts the use of humor in our schools, we could prevent bullying before it has a chance to begin. That was my experience working with kids, and seeing this transformation was truly inspiring. Despite abuse, neglect, and isolation, I found that children ultimately craved the chance to laugh along with others in the same situation. When they reached this place the bullying disappeared, and this humor lesson taught me at least as much as I taught the children.

Of all the research I’ve done on the healing power of laughter; none has failed to top the amazing story of Norman Cousins, as his life truly speaks to the incredible power of laughter. Having read several varying legends about Cousin’s actual story, I decided to read his book Anatomy of an Illness and get to the source of the legend of the man who claimed to have literally laughed his way back to health.

His story began in 1964, where doctors found that the connective tissue in his spine was deteriorating, which a condition is known as Ankylosing Spondylitis. The doctors, one of whom was a close friend of Cousins, speculated that his chance of survival was approximately 1 in 500.

Faced with the real prospect of his impending death, Cousins thought long and hard about what role, if any he could play in his own recovery, and eventually did three things utterly contrary to medical opinion.

First he began his own research on all of the various drugs he was on. He discovered that his condition was depleting his body of Vitamin C and, based primarily on Cousins’ personal research, doctors agreed to take him off several of the drugs he was on and inject him with extremely large doses of this supplement, as Cousins felt this may be his last hope.

Secondly, Cousins made a decision to check himself out the hospital and into a hotel room. Cousin’s had concluded that hospitals, with their haphazard hygiene practices, culture of overmedication, general feelings of negativity, and routines that disrupted basic sleep patterns, all contributed to his feeling that, in his words a hospital was “no place for a person who is seriously ill.”

The third thing Cousin’s did was procure a movie projector and a large supply of funny films, including numerous Candid Camera tapes and several old prints of Marx Brother’s movies. On his first night in the hotel Cousins found that he laughed so hard at the films that he was able to stimulate chemicals in his body that allowed him several hours of pain free sleep. When the pain would return he would simply turn the projector back on and the laughter would reinduce sleep, and he was able to measure the changes in his body by measuring his blood sedimentation rate, a key measurement of inflammation and infection in the blood, and found that this rate dropped by at least 5 points each time he watched one of these videos,

Now off every drug excepting Vitamin C and laughter, Cousins described being in a state of euphoria over the next week as he continued to laugh himself back to health. Within a few weeks the beloved editor was back to work at the Saturday Review, and, although he still had some minor physical difficulties, his body continued to recover as he continued with his self- directed wellness program.

How in the world did this happen? In exploring this question it is interesting to consider Cousin’s own state of mind, and how much his personal will to live as well as his personal attitudes contributed to his miraculous recovery. While in the hospital Cousins hypothesized that if negative emotions such as anger and frustration could contribute to poor health, why couldn’t positive emotions such as joy and laughter have the opposite effect? Cousins soon embraced this idea, and this contributed to an optimistic attitude that may very well have saved his life.

So could Cousin’s recovery be considered a mechanism of the placebo effect? In answering this question Cousins himself spoke to famous endocrinologist Ana Aslan who posited that creativity was the central trigger of the placebo effect, as it sets up a chain of events in the body’s systems that eventually restores homeostasis and feelings of wellness, The implications of this assertion are potentially enormous, and certainly deserves further study.

In analyzing the potential placebo affect in his own case, Cousins attributed much of his own success to the close personal friendship and relationship he had with his doctor who fully supported his contributions to his own recovery and encouraged his highly experimental approach despite it not fitting with his preconceived medical model. This idea once again speaks to the power of the relationship between doctor and patient, which is now nearly universally accepted and statistically verified as the single most important predictor of positive outcomes in talk therapy. But could this also be true for physicians and patients in the world of medicine? A great deal of research seems to suggest that it is, and Cousin’s case certainly speaks to this idea.

Most fascinating about Cousin’s story though is the laughter. Despite intense pain and discomfort, Cousin’s made a point of laughing so hard his stomach hurt during the early stages of his Marx brother’s intervention, and this “unquenchable” laughter never failed to produce a strong reduction in his feelings of pain. Cousins goes on to mention many prominent thinkers throughout the ages who knew about the healing power of laughter, and this list includes Sir Frances Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, as well as the great Albert Schweitzer. This list could be much longer, and Cousins own story has given rise to many knew ways of thinking that helped contribute to the rise of phenomena such as the laughter club. Ultimately laughter may represent the rapture of the human spirit, and in finding this rapture we also find our way back to health. Norman Cousins certainly thought so, and his journey back to life through laughter is an inspiration to us all.

The creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.”

-Eric Hoffel
If Norman Cousins was the Lazarus of laughter, then Saint Paul would have to be Patch Adams, who has spread the word about the healing power of laughter into some of the darkest places on the globe. Many people are familiar with the movie about this wonderful man, but many may not know he also travels to places ripped apart by war and ethnic cleansing like Bosnia where he continues to spread the word. Patch and his clowns have worked with Aids patients in Africa, refugees in Afghanistan, as well as with children in Haiti and El Salvador, and have found that laughter can reach people even in the utter depths of despair.

What Patch also found was that beyond medical attention, what many people needed was stimulation and to reconnect with their fellow human beings. He found that many “medical” conditions were in fact a symptom of a loss of connection with life that manifested itself in a person’s biological conditions. This was often the case with the elderly people I worked with in my own life, as the decline in their physical health often coincided with their loss of connection with the outside world. By providing stimulation and laughter we were able to provide a kind of reconnection, and this often had positive implications for their physical health that made even the most skeptical medical practitioners take pause.

In Patch’s own words, “we found that the vast majority of our adult population does not have a day to day vitality for life (which we would define as good health). The idea that a person was healthy because of normal lab values and clear x-rays had no relationship to who the person was. Good health was much more deeply related to close friendships, meaningful work, a lived spirituality of any kind, an opportunity for loving service and an engaging relationship to nature, the arts, wonder, curiosity, passion and hope. All of these are time-consuming, impractical needs. When we don’t meet these needs, the business of high-tech medicine diagnoses mental illness and treats with pills.”

These are very wise words that got me thinking about the idea of loss as it relates to physical health. As Mental Health practitioners understanding what a person has lost in their life often reveals important clues as to what brings a person in to see us. Have they lost their job? Their marriage? A close friend? Their looks? Their youth? Asking these questions offers important clues as to the origins of a person’s problem, and the answer to these questions may be a prescription for all of the things Patch Adams describes above as a “road back” to life. The key to this road back begins with laughter, as through laughing we can begin to filter life’s losses through the wisdom and humor of our shared humanity. By learning to laugh at our own misfortunes we may develop a deep kinship with our fellow travelers as we take solace in our common fallibility. This creates connections, and these connections help us build relationships, and laughter is the glue that may bond these relationships together. Patch Adams has spent a lifetime demonstrating the power of this simple yet elegant principle, and his life has been an example of the power of this idea.

Brad Blanton believes in telling it like it is. His book Radical Honesty written in 1996 hypothesizes that much our personal unhappiness comes about as a result of the lies we tell to ourselves, and lies about ourselves we tell to others. He writes that we can become so obsessed with managing other’s impression of us, that we eventually destroy our physical and mental health trying to keep this house of cards we have constructed from falling down. Blanton believes that by being totally honest in our lives we may liberate these bonds that constrain us, and in doing so find a way back to lives full of joy and new possibilities.

Is he right? Reading his book I was struck again and again of his discussion of honesty as a kind of liberation, and in reading this I thought back on my own life and how good it felt getting a particularly cumbersome weight of dishonesty off my shoulders. So what does this have to do with laughter? My thoughts are that much of the dishonest communication that occurs between people does in fact have to do with impression management, and that perhaps laughter can be the bridge across our obsession with what other may think about us. The people I like the most in my own life all have the same kind of self-deprecating humility that consistently comes out in their communications with others. Their willingness to laugh at their own limitations never fails to ingratiate them to the people they are around, and seeing them at work I’ve learned that it is often the people who are the most humble that I end up admiring the most.

So is there a relationship between humor and honesty? It has been my experience that the answer to this is unquestionably yes. The funniest things are often those observations that reflect pure honesty about the human condition back to us in a way that utterly convinces us of our shared absurdity. Rather than reject this absurdity as meaningless, we may find comfort in the fact that we are all going through this together. As Elvis Costello put in so eloquently in his song The Angels wannna wear my red shoes ”I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.” Good advice about the kind of passive volition that fuels the fire of wisdom.

One closing thought about honesty and laughter in relationships. Think about the people in your life you have shared a true, hysterical, rolling on the floor, out of breath, fit of laughter with. What did they all have in common? My guess is these people are nearly always those we have the most trust and honesty with in our personal relationships. It is these people who know everything about us, and have seen us at our best and our worst that we are able to really let ourselves go with, and it is personal honesty that likely makes this possible. These moments of true and unequivocal laughter with another human represent the most powerful kind of human connection we can find, and in these moments we are utterly and totally free of modesty, vanity, and fear. Dropping these pretensions makes this possible, and speaks volumes about the power and relationship of laughter and honesty in creating human connections.