From the New York Times:
By ERIC TRUMP
On Jan. 30, 1962, at Kashasha village near Lake Victoria in what is now Tanzania, three schoolgirls got the giggles. Tears rolling down their cheeks, they couldn't stop laughing or keep their contagion of chuckles from spreading to almost half the other girls at their boarding school. Some fits were lasting minutes, others hours, some up to 16 days, until exasperated administrators closed the school five months later. Afflicted girls were sent home to their villages around Lake Victoria, where they duly infected more children and young adults with their "sickness." Before the epidemic finally relented, in 1964, it forced the temporary closing of more than 14 schools, all because of unstoppable laughter.
What was so funny no one ever discovered, but the mirth gathered a momentum that caught hundreds of unsuspecting villagers in its riptide. At the time, it was considered a pathology to be quarantined and quashed. But today, this unmoored laughter is celebrated in over 1,000 laughter clubs worldwide as a therapy to reduce stress, lower blood pressure, strengthen the immune system and perhaps even lead to world peace.
The first club began with Dr. Madan Kataria, known as the Giggling Guru, in Bombay. In 1995, having read about the health benefits of hasya (laughing) yoga, he gathered a few friends in a park where they told jokes to one another. But over time the jokes fell flat or got smutty, so Dr. Kataria developed a catalog of comical expressions and sounds that he and his confreres used to stimulate and simulate laughter. The guiding principle was that while humor can fail to produce the expulsion of air and muscle contractions known as laughter, forced laughter always works because it transcends thought.
Dr. Kataria's trick worked. His most famous stance, the lion laugh (eyes bulging, voice roaring and hands pawing the air), got even the most world-weary laughing. His group grew, meeting regularly to force laughter into the morning air. By 1998, it was a movement, with 12,000 people gathering at a Bombay racetrack to celebrate the first World Laughter Day, a day that this year was celebrated here and in India on May 5.
Since then, laughter clubs have been erupting all over the world. They were introduced to America through Dr. Kataria's friend Steve Wilson of Columbus, Ohio, a self-described "joyologist" and former psychologist who trains club leaders and was a co-founder of the World Laughter Tour Inc., a clearinghouse for what participants call the American laughter movement. Naturally the group has a Web site (www .worldlaughtertour.com) directing the curious to local chapters or "a Certified Laughter Leader in your area."
"The human spirit always comes back to laughter," said Mr. Wilson, who is also known as the Cheerman of the Bored. "Misery loves company, but laughter loves it more. It's a sign of health and perseverance. We've got 5,000 years of proof."
Human beings, of course, have been laughing a long time. Robert Provine, a behavioral neurobiologist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, believes that the first laugh rang out about six million years ago, when hominids first stood upright, a position that allowed for respiratory control and freed the lungs and larynx to laugh. Laughter developed, he writes in "Laughter: A Scientific Investigation" (Viking, 2000), before language, and was the result not of jest, but of fear, giddiness, disappointment � a passing mammoth. Mr. Provine, who has recorded hundreds of episodes of people laughing, says that some 90 percent of our laughter is not the direct result of a specific joke.
Laughter has been the subject of serious speculation for a long time. Plato was wary of the sound's effect on the republic's guardians and wanted it censored. Aristotle argued for moderation: excess laughter was for "buffoons." By the Renaissance, laughter studies had emerged. In the 17th century, Hobbes supported the superiority theory, which held that laughter was a "sudden glory that arises" when we realize how great we are compared to everyone else. (Perhaps that's what behind the gleeful mirth of the evil genius in the old James Bond films.) Later, Kant and Schopenhauer thought laughter arose from incongruity, that is, when events don't conform to expectations (30 clowns emerge from a tiny car). And third, the relief theory, best elucidated by Freud, says that we laugh to release pent-up energy. Recall that passing mammoth.
These theories aside, laughter's health benefits have been touted for centuries. Norman Cousins's 1979 book, "Anatomy of an Illness," describes beating cancer with "Candid Camera" episodes and Marx Brothers films; the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that at Auschwitz laughter was "another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation"; and the seventh-century Zen monks Kanzan and Jittoku believed in laughter as the path to inner peace.
For Stephan Wischerth, a certified laughter club leader in New York, no one needs a reason or a theory to laugh. Each week, he leads a handful of men and women in laughter at Healing Works Midtown Manhattan, a center that offers free holistic programs to low-income people.
"I'm not making anyone laugh," Mr. Wischerth explained. "We're not laughing at � we're just laughing. We're giving each other license to laugh without embarrassment." After breathing and stretching exercises, followed by the laughter movement's mantra, "Ho-Ho-Ha-Ha-Ha," Mr. Wischert is ready to begin.
"Have you had a vowel movement today?" he asks, bending low and then stretching up in a moan that ends in a shriek-laugh, his face resembling the "before" photo of an Ex-lax commercial. The three others � a registered nurse, an outreach worker, a minister � follow suit with bulging veins and red faces. The room fills with the groan of vowels stretching into laughter. More exercises follow: the opera laugh, the chicken laugh, the subway laugh. The "Why Me?" laugh begins as a parody of misery and weeping, but the falsetto repetition of this threadbare query demonstrates, after about 45 seconds, that William Blake was right: "Excess of sorrow laughs."
Still, Mr. Provine, the behavioral neurobiologist, says there is little scientific evidence that laughter is good for you. "The presumed health benefits are few and far between," he said. Rather, laughter may be a side effect of good health.
"Laughter is about relationships," he said. "It may not be laughter that is healthy, but the environment � the friends and family � that lead to laughter. Laughter probably doesn't make us live longer, but if you like it, go for it."
Laugh clubbers are. Mr. Wilson dreams of the day when he'll lead the United Nations in a lion laugh for peace, and Dr. Kataria wants to see the Olympics begin with a laugh. Laughter is certainly more democratic now than it was back in Voltaire's day, when aristocrats went to the local asylum and taunted the inmates to get some kicks.
By ERIC TRUMP
On Jan. 30, 1962, at Kashasha village near Lake Victoria in what is now Tanzania, three schoolgirls got the giggles. Tears rolling down their cheeks, they couldn't stop laughing or keep their contagion of chuckles from spreading to almost half the other girls at their boarding school. Some fits were lasting minutes, others hours, some up to 16 days, until exasperated administrators closed the school five months later. Afflicted girls were sent home to their villages around Lake Victoria, where they duly infected more children and young adults with their "sickness." Before the epidemic finally relented, in 1964, it forced the temporary closing of more than 14 schools, all because of unstoppable laughter.
What was so funny no one ever discovered, but the mirth gathered a momentum that caught hundreds of unsuspecting villagers in its riptide. At the time, it was considered a pathology to be quarantined and quashed. But today, this unmoored laughter is celebrated in over 1,000 laughter clubs worldwide as a therapy to reduce stress, lower blood pressure, strengthen the immune system and perhaps even lead to world peace.
The first club began with Dr. Madan Kataria, known as the Giggling Guru, in Bombay. In 1995, having read about the health benefits of hasya (laughing) yoga, he gathered a few friends in a park where they told jokes to one another. But over time the jokes fell flat or got smutty, so Dr. Kataria developed a catalog of comical expressions and sounds that he and his confreres used to stimulate and simulate laughter. The guiding principle was that while humor can fail to produce the expulsion of air and muscle contractions known as laughter, forced laughter always works because it transcends thought.
Dr. Kataria's trick worked. His most famous stance, the lion laugh (eyes bulging, voice roaring and hands pawing the air), got even the most world-weary laughing. His group grew, meeting regularly to force laughter into the morning air. By 1998, it was a movement, with 12,000 people gathering at a Bombay racetrack to celebrate the first World Laughter Day, a day that this year was celebrated here and in India on May 5.
Since then, laughter clubs have been erupting all over the world. They were introduced to America through Dr. Kataria's friend Steve Wilson of Columbus, Ohio, a self-described "joyologist" and former psychologist who trains club leaders and was a co-founder of the World Laughter Tour Inc., a clearinghouse for what participants call the American laughter movement. Naturally the group has a Web site (www .worldlaughtertour.com) directing the curious to local chapters or "a Certified Laughter Leader in your area."
"The human spirit always comes back to laughter," said Mr. Wilson, who is also known as the Cheerman of the Bored. "Misery loves company, but laughter loves it more. It's a sign of health and perseverance. We've got 5,000 years of proof."
Human beings, of course, have been laughing a long time. Robert Provine, a behavioral neurobiologist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, believes that the first laugh rang out about six million years ago, when hominids first stood upright, a position that allowed for respiratory control and freed the lungs and larynx to laugh. Laughter developed, he writes in "Laughter: A Scientific Investigation" (Viking, 2000), before language, and was the result not of jest, but of fear, giddiness, disappointment � a passing mammoth. Mr. Provine, who has recorded hundreds of episodes of people laughing, says that some 90 percent of our laughter is not the direct result of a specific joke.
Laughter has been the subject of serious speculation for a long time. Plato was wary of the sound's effect on the republic's guardians and wanted it censored. Aristotle argued for moderation: excess laughter was for "buffoons." By the Renaissance, laughter studies had emerged. In the 17th century, Hobbes supported the superiority theory, which held that laughter was a "sudden glory that arises" when we realize how great we are compared to everyone else. (Perhaps that's what behind the gleeful mirth of the evil genius in the old James Bond films.) Later, Kant and Schopenhauer thought laughter arose from incongruity, that is, when events don't conform to expectations (30 clowns emerge from a tiny car). And third, the relief theory, best elucidated by Freud, says that we laugh to release pent-up energy. Recall that passing mammoth.
These theories aside, laughter's health benefits have been touted for centuries. Norman Cousins's 1979 book, "Anatomy of an Illness," describes beating cancer with "Candid Camera" episodes and Marx Brothers films; the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that at Auschwitz laughter was "another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation"; and the seventh-century Zen monks Kanzan and Jittoku believed in laughter as the path to inner peace.
For Stephan Wischerth, a certified laughter club leader in New York, no one needs a reason or a theory to laugh. Each week, he leads a handful of men and women in laughter at Healing Works Midtown Manhattan, a center that offers free holistic programs to low-income people.
"I'm not making anyone laugh," Mr. Wischerth explained. "We're not laughing at � we're just laughing. We're giving each other license to laugh without embarrassment." After breathing and stretching exercises, followed by the laughter movement's mantra, "Ho-Ho-Ha-Ha-Ha," Mr. Wischert is ready to begin.
"Have you had a vowel movement today?" he asks, bending low and then stretching up in a moan that ends in a shriek-laugh, his face resembling the "before" photo of an Ex-lax commercial. The three others � a registered nurse, an outreach worker, a minister � follow suit with bulging veins and red faces. The room fills with the groan of vowels stretching into laughter. More exercises follow: the opera laugh, the chicken laugh, the subway laugh. The "Why Me?" laugh begins as a parody of misery and weeping, but the falsetto repetition of this threadbare query demonstrates, after about 45 seconds, that William Blake was right: "Excess of sorrow laughs."
Still, Mr. Provine, the behavioral neurobiologist, says there is little scientific evidence that laughter is good for you. "The presumed health benefits are few and far between," he said. Rather, laughter may be a side effect of good health.
"Laughter is about relationships," he said. "It may not be laughter that is healthy, but the environment � the friends and family � that lead to laughter. Laughter probably doesn't make us live longer, but if you like it, go for it."
Laugh clubbers are. Mr. Wilson dreams of the day when he'll lead the United Nations in a lion laugh for peace, and Dr. Kataria wants to see the Olympics begin with a laugh. Laughter is certainly more democratic now than it was back in Voltaire's day, when aristocrats went to the local asylum and taunted the inmates to get some kicks.
