Laughter: Joyous and Powerful

Laughter: Joyous and Powerful

In his 1977 song, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” Jimmy Buffett counseled that through all the islands and highlands of life, “If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.” While the words fit the beat of the music, they also suggest a tempo for daily living — remembering to keep life’s highs and lows in perspective with a healthy sense of humor.

The ability to laugh at ourselves and at the ironies of the world around us protects us from illness, and insulates our hearts and minds against the unrelenting, toxic flow of negativity filling the daily news. The American author Norman Cousins proved the truth of the axiom “laughter is the best medicine” when he was diagnosed with heart disease and a condition that caused the connective tissues in his spine to deteriorate.

Cousins chose to rely on a positive attitude heavily salted with laughter to fuel his recovery. In 1964, he checked out of the hospital and into a hotel room with tapes of Candid Camera episodes and Marx Brothers’ movies. By measuring the responses of his body, Cousins concluded that the more he laughed, the less he suffered the pain of his conditions.

In his memoir, Anatomy of an Illness, he wrote, “I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.” Against all odds, Cousins survived, living well into his eighties, more than 35 years after his initial diagnosis.

While lauded by a jaded American public as a groundbreaking revelation, Cousins’ discovery of the value of humor was simply a powerful reminder of a fundamental truth. The oldest written collection of jokes, the Philogelos, was set down in Greek sometime around the 4th century CE. Going back even farther, at the end of the 2nd century BCE, a social club in Athens recorded its members’ jokes at the behest of Philip II of Macedon. In fact, one of the primary objections the Romans raised about those pesky Greeks was simply that they laughed too much.

We now know scientifically that laughter releases endorphins in our bodies, chemicals that do relieve pain just as Cousins suggested. Laughter also protects us by increasing the production of globulins (immune proteins), as well as upping our levels of interferon and T-cells. Perhaps most significantly, however, for Americans plagued with an epidemic of stress, laughter lowers the levels of cortisol that flood our bloodstream as a consequence of adrenal fatigue.

These tangible, physical benefits only augment what most people know intuitively about the value of humor. If we can laugh, we can maintain perspective, hold our fears at bay, lighten up on the tendency to self-criticize, and even release our own creativity. The poet W.H. Auden mused that he found no common denominator among the people he admired, but “among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.” What better expression of love, for yourself and for those around you, than to live life with a joyous appreciation of the healing power of laughter?

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