Laugh With Me
What I read: How to laugh more by Freda Gonot-Schoupinsky in Psyche. Published March 17, 2021.
Look at this photo.
When we look at a photo or video of someone laughing, or we witness others laughing in our presence, it makes us feel good. It often leads to us emitting a chuckle ourselves, perhaps an outright belly laugh. It turns out laughter is incredibly good for us.
There are even people who study laughter.
gelotologist: a person who studies humour and laughter
Gelotologist Freda Gonot-Schoupinsky details why laughter is so good for us and how we might go about inserting some laughter into our lives in various ways.
Perhaps as part of our self-care we should add some laughter-inducing content or just stop for a moment to generate some spontaneous laughter during our daily schedules.
There are many documented benefits to laughter including an enhanced immune system, muscle relaxation, and reduced blood pressure. The list of physical benefits is long and impressive. Along with the physical benefits, there are many others too.
There are also benefits for psychological health and personal development. When you laugh, your brain releases mood-boosting chemicals, including endorphins, and fewer stress hormones – so laughing can reduce feelings of stress and symptoms of depression, and help you cope in challenging environments. Laughter can also improve sleep quality, increase self-esteem and creative thinking, and provide an environment that enhances learning. All that considered, we’d be wise to follow the words of the poet Lord Byron: ‘Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.’
As the article points out, you do not need comedy material or someone else present to spawn your own laughter. Laughing for its own sake, with no ostensible reason for doing so, can generate many of the upsides of laughter.
Most of us think of laughter as a spontaneous reaction to something funny, but that’s not always the case. Just think about babies – they don’t need jokes to laugh, and neither do we. Humour can certainly make us laugh, and laughing can make things humorous. But based on my own research and others’, it’s clear that they can occur separately too – and laughter without humour can still make you feel happy. The upshot is that we don’t need to wait for something funny to happen before we can experience the benefits of laughter.
I will not go into details about some of the methods offered in the article to enjoy laughing alone. Gonot-Schoupinsky lists some specifics about the seven “humour habits” devised by the American psychologist Paul McGhee, a pioneer in humour research. Check out McGhee’s book, Humor as Survival Training for a Stressed-Out World, for a more thorough elaboration on the seven habits, but the article lists: surrounding yourself with humor; cultivating a playful attitude at work and home; and intentionally trying to laugh more and more heartily.
I plan to check out McGhee’s book because as Gonot-Schoupinsky mentions we can indeed train ourselves to find more humor in our lives, thereby improving our lives considerably.
…the psychologist Willibald Ruch and colleagues at the University of Zurich trained a group of adults in McGhee’s seven humour habits programme, and found that humour can indeed be trained. Compared with a control group, participants who completed the eight-week training programme reported that their mood improved and they took themselves less seriously – and, importantly, close friends rated that their sense of humour had improved too.
Gonot-Schoupinsky suggests a bunch of ways to add humor into your life, some of them solo approaches and some of them social. I encourage everyone to try out some of the suggestions because I defy anyone to honestly say that more humor is a bad thing. How can it be? We all need to laugh at life and ourselves, often.
Check out Gonot-Schoupinsky’s “Laughie” suggestion, a reference to the now ubiquitous selfie, and a clever strategy to proliferate humor and laughter throughout our day.
I had the idea for the ‘Laughie’, a quick and easy way for the medical community to prescribe laughter. It’s like a selfie, except instead of taking a photo of yourself, you use your smartphone to record yourself laughing and then keep that to laugh with whenever you want.
What a great idea!
If watching or reading funny stuff is your thing, there is an abundance of funny material available to give your funny bone a tickle.
In May 2014, Rolling Stone published the results of their poll to determine The 25 Funniest Movies of All Time. In March 2021, Ranker published its rankings of The Absolute Funniest Movies Of All Time.
You can scan YouTube for an array of funny videos, but you can jumpstart your search with Mashables September 2018 20 of the funniest YouTube videos ever per Reddit. For a more current list, Digital Trends published their own list of funny YouTube videos, The funniest YouTube videos of all time, in March 2021.
One of my favorite ways to laugh is to watch standup comics. I consider what they do among the most difficult of performance art forms and an important social contribution. Being in the business of making people laugh is to do truly noble work. Depending on your streaming service, you can watch a lot of great comedians. In March 2021, Uproxx published their The Best Stand-Up Comedy Specials On Netflix Right Now, Ranked. In March 2021, Vulture published its The 30 Best Comedies on Hulu Right Now. In January 2021, Digital Trends published its The best stand-up comedy on Amazon Prime. Do your own searches and you will find many more such lists.
Lately, one of my favorite comedians is Hannah Gadsby. How Gadsby blends humor, insight, and commentary into supremely funny comedy is absolutely brilliant and I recommend watching any of her performances. Here is a taste from one of her Netflix comedy specials.
If you’re a reader like me, perhaps adding some funny books into your reading stack is a good idea. In April 2019, NPR published its We Did It For The LOLs: 100 Favorite Funny Books. Esquire put together a nice list of 39 Of The Funniest Books Ever Written.
For some short jolts of laughter, maybe some jokes. Bored Panda published this fun list of 52 Of The Funniest Two-Line Jokes Ever. There are a bunch of lists online of the funniest jokes ever told liked Metro’s The ten funniest jokes ever (according to science).
And if you ever want to add some laughter to a video you create, check out these five laughter sound effects you can use to get the viewer to smile and laugh.
The article lists some great resources and they are worth checking out. I plan to dive into them to see what I can do about choosing to laugh more, or get others to laugh more, now that I realize how important it is. Laughter brings us closer together as humans. As comedian Victor Borge once said,
Laughter is the closest distance between two people.
I could not agree more. 😂