Cancer Is a Laughing Matter at This Clinic

A funny thing happened the other day on the way to the cancer center. . . .

Funny ha-ha, not funny peculiar.

Arriving singly or in pairs at the center--the Wellness Community in Santa Monica--the cancer patients were smiling, giggling, talking to themselves, rehearsing their jokes.

Inside, the zingers were already flying--the zingers and the endorphins.

“This guy’s driving to work and he sees this pig in the middle of the freeway,” a man is saying. “He stops and grabs the pig. A highway patrolman comes by. The guy asks the cop what he should do with the pig.

“ ‘Why don’t you take it to the zoo,’ says the cop. ‘Good idea,’ says the guy.’

“Next day the patrolman sees the same guy driving down the same freeway. The pig is still in the car. The cop pulls him over.

“ ‘Hey, buddy,’ the cop says, ‘I thought I told you to take that pig to the zoo.’

“ ‘I did, I did,’ says the guy, ‘and we had so much fun I’m taking him to Disneyland.’ ”

The room breaks up.

In a way, it’s a tough room to play: an audience of 40 or 45, two-thirds of them cancer patients, the rest family or friends.

It’s the First Sunday Brunch Joke Fest of the Wellness Community, with prizes for best and worst, and the judging is harsh if hysterical. On a scale of 1 to 10, one woman’s gag, the one about the cockeyed judge, gets a minus 5. She deserves it.

Moderator and instigator is Ken Shapiro, who orchestrates the amateurs from under a snappy wool cap. Shapiro, a very funny man who produced and directed the cult favorite “Groove Tube,” is undergoing intensive cancer treatment.

Somebody has come up with some extra prizes, 10 complimentary tickets to a local race track “for anyone who tells a joke that doesn’t make you throw up.” Shapiro sizes up the field, decides “It’s going to be hard to give all these away.”

Boos and catcalls. Endorphins.

“Let’s talk about the relationship between laughter and recovery,” Shapiro says. “Has anyone made laughter an organized part of his or her recovery?”

“I read (Norman) Cousins’ book, ‘An Anatomy of an Illness,’ ” a man named Jeff says. (Cousins is honorary board chairman of the Wellness Community.) “He basically says that laughter produces chemicals (hormones called endorphins) that are very beneficial. That was enough for me.

Laughter Helps Recovery Process

“I’ve found, personally, that laughter really helps with the recovery process. Now I prefer comedies to anything else on TV. Books too. When I go to the hospital to take chemotherapy, I bring Woody Allen along.”

“I got home a year ago after colon-cancer surgery,” a woman says. “From then on, I’ve never listened to the news on the radio in the morning. I put on music instead. Then I started watching that bloopers-and-bleepers thing on TV, and I found the laughter isn’t just fun, it’s essential. I’m celebrating my first anniversary now, with bloopers.”

“I agree,” Shapiro says. “I never watch the TV news. Too depressing. For the same reason, I never, never watch commercials.”

The Joke Fest resumes. It is only 11 a.m., not exactly the witching hour for wheezes. “Kinda hard to get wound up,” a man whispers to his wife in the middle of a yawn. “I know,” she replies. “It’s tough to shed your inhibitions on prune juice.”

Nevertheless, tentative titters begin to give way to guffaws. By 11:30, the endorphins are bouncing off the walls. The jokes are getting raunchy. Truly heart-warming.

“OK,” says a rather prim-looking woman in a severe navy-blue suit. “Now that the gloves are off, did you hear the one about the traveling salesman. . . ?”

“The Wellness Community is not a hospice, not a place for cancer patients to cope with the disease,” founder/executive director Harold Benjamin said before the Joke Fest.

“It’s a place where cancer patients can learn whatever they need to know to fight for their recovery, along with their physicians.”

Benjamin had been practicing law in Beverly Hills for 30 years when he became involved in “what’s known as psycho-neuro immunology, the relationships between the brain and the body, how they affect each other.” He became obsessed with the idea of the Wellness Community.

“From August to December of 1981, I spend most of my time writing about it--which was not lost on my law partner. One day he said, ‘Harold, listen: Either come back to work or let me buy you out.’

“I thought for fully three seconds before I said, ‘Buy me out.’

“I found the place (1235 5th St., Santa Monica 90401; (213) 393-1415) in April, 1982. We opened in June. We didn’t have a single participant, a single backer, a single physician on our side.

“All the money that was necessary for the first 2 1/2 years, I paid. I didn’t want to ask anyone else for money because I wasn’t sure it was going to work.

“Now we see 275 cancer patients a week.”

Slowly but perceptibly, as in a mortal struggle between the Forces of Light and Darkness, the clean jokes are making a comeback. Not racking up too many points, to be sure, but laying claim to the odd chortle all the same.

There is an understandably delayed reaction to the punch line of an involved caper centering on Roy Rogers’ boots: “Pardon me, Roy, is this the cat that chewed your new shoes?” You hadda be there.

The one about the landlady who was said to have run off with her star boarder. (It turned out to be only a roomer.)

The snail that insisted on changing all the Z logos adorning his new sports car to S’s. “When I tool down the freeway, I want everybody to say, ‘Look at that S-car go!’ ”

“Anybody have a good cancer joke?” Shapiro asks. Half a dozen hands go up.

“Great,” says Shapiro, who appreciates that true humor begins at home. “Try to top this one. . . .”

Bowdlerized version: A man stops by his doctor’s office to get the results of a check-up. The doctor tells him he has cancer.

“How long do I have?”

“I’m sorry. Just until tonight.”

The man goes home, tells his wife. When they’ve finished crying, he suggests that they go upstairs and fool around, just one last time.

“Golly, Herb,” she says, “I’d love to, but I’m really too tired.

“Aw come on,” he urges, “just for old time’s sake.”

“Sure, that’s easy for you to say,” she relies. “You don’t have to get up in the morning.”

“I come to the Wellness Community primarily because it’s a place I can relax, off-guard, with other cancer patients,” said Vincent, one of the more outrageous joke tellers.

“If I’m feeling up-tight, I can let it all hang out and people will understand and not cluck over me. And if I’m in a happy, comfortable mood, I can share that too.

“Outside, I don’t tell acquaintances about the cancer. I don’t look like I have it; I don’t act like I have it--nor do most of the people here--so why tell relative strangers? It just seems to upset them.

“Even the people near and dear to me, those who know--I seem to put them under some kind of pressure, tension. They don’t know when or whether to laugh or relax.

“It’s hard to deal with a close person who’s maybe going to die, maybe even painfully, so they build a wall to stay away from it. They mean well, of course, but they act artificially, and then everybody’s uncomfortable. I represent their mortality.

“I was in a VA hospital for a long time. My group died off, mostly, so I came here, mostly for the social sessions.

“Then I got into smaller groups: the guided-imagery group, relaxation techniques, psychological counseling, nutrition. . . .

“We share feeling, attitudes. We can be ourselves, fighting the good fight together.

“Hey, people die here too, some of them, but we sure have a lot of fun getting there!”

“The cancer patients who come here know how difficult it is to talk to people who have cancer,” Benjamin said, “because they themselves didn’t have cancer a little while ago and they felt the same way. They know cancer patients scare the hell out of everybody.

“These people here today have been abandoned, in a sense, not only by their families but by everybody--everybody who has the perception that when you get diagnosed as having cancer your life is over from that second. That you’re doomed to die and that life is going to be horrible from that point on. That the treatment’s not going to do you any good, it’s just going to make you sicker and you’re going to die anyway.

“Well, that’s not true ! And I can show you 300 cancer patients a week who don’t believe that’s true.

“These people you will meet today are fighting for their recovery. They have hope that they will recover.

“Listen, when I first started the wellness group, everybody said, ‘Don’t give them false hope,’ and for a while I really gave that some credence.

“But you know what? There no such thing as false hope.

“If we told them, ‘If you do certain things, you’ll get better, guaranteed,’ that would be either stupidity or fraud. But if 1 out of 500 people get well, is it unreasonable to hope you’ll be that one person? Not to me it isn’t.”

Some of the jokers are hopeless. Hopeless story tellers, egged on, nevertheless, by their partisans, urged to take one last shot at the booby prize.

All of them, moreover, are helpless now, reduced to tears, some of them, by gags that are getting better and worse, simultaneously.

One man tells the story of the cowboy who retires to Israel, only to learn that his new horse doesn’t understand English. “Just tell him ‘ oi ‘ for giddyap and ‘ shalom ‘ for whoa,” says the trainer.

“ Oi ,” the cowboy says, “ oi-oi ,” and off he goes, galloping over the Negev until he comes perilously close to a precipice.

“ Shalom !” yells the cowboy. The horse skids to a halt, inches from the cliff.

Still astride, the cowboy sneaks a peek over the cliff, a sheer drop of 2,000 feet, and shakes his head in mixed astonishment and relief. “ Oi-oi-oi! “ he says. . . .

Between jokes, somebody passes around homemade banana bread good enough to resuscitate Lazarus, and the conversation drifts back to endorphins and their possible effect on the immune system.

“They’re secreted by the brain,” somebody explains. “They supply a natural morphine-like substance for pain relief.”

Another suggests that meditation can release endorphins; extended exercise as well. Still another asks Jeff, who brought up the subject in the first place, whether smiling is enough, or do you have to actually laugh out loud.

“I’m not sure,” Jeff says, “but I do know that good sex releases good endorphins too.”

“Sure,” a friend says, “especially if your partner is laughing at you.”

Somebody releases a hernia joke, too painful to relate. A rabbi joke is answered by a missionary joke. Nuns get equal time.

A cancer patient with a 1-year-old on his arm stands up to tell a joke.

“You can’t fool us,” somebody yells. “The baby’s a ventriloquist!”

Benjamin, it turned out, was a prophet. “These are not people who have given up--on anything,” he had said before the Joke Fest.

Benjamin had not given up during the lean years of the Wellness Community. Now the center boasts membership on its professional advisory board of many of the most prominent oncologists and psychologists of the community--from USC, Cedars-Sinai, UCLA. . . . There is a staff of 14, “all of them paid professionals,” Benjamin says.

“For the patients, everything is free.

“We are making an impact. I’d like it to be a larger impact, much larger. What I’d like is for cancer patients all over the country to know that they can be participants in their fight for recovery.

“I want them to know that if you participate in this fight, along with your physician, you don’t have to be a hopeless, helpless, passive, all-alone victim of this disease.

“If you participate, you will improve the quality of your life, which in and of itself may well enhance the possibility of your recovery.

“The will to live has a very specific effect on the recovery process--and the will to live is nothing more or less than a gauge of the quality of life--and vice versa, of course. At the Wellness Community, we hope to enhance the quality of your life.”

Jerry, a young raconteur extraordinaire, has temporarily lost his will to live. The grand prize for his exquisite parodies (complete with the body language of an X-rated pretzel), the prize for which he had labored so long and hard . . . turns out to be a rubber chicken.

Jerry bounces back, in time to witness the unveiling of the booby prize, won by one Debbie. Debbie’s prize: a coffee mug embossed with the portraits of Charles and Diana. They are smiling. Sort of. “About half an endorphin’s worth,” somebody remarks charitably.

There is continued discussion, on whether you have to be receptive to appreciate comedy, or whether it’s comedy that makes you receptive to life. Majority vote for the latter.

“Science is finally catching up to what people have known intuitively forever,” one man says, “that laughter is the best medicine. Chicken soup, too.”

“At least for the time you’re laughing,” a woman says, “you’re not even thinking about stress.”

“It’s important not to take things too seriously,” a man adds, seriously. “Even your cancer. Don’t even take life seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive.”

“I don’t know about those endorphins,” says Vincent, the VA patient. “It’s a little technical for me.

“One thing I do know. When we came in here, a lot of us, maybe we were a little down. Two hours of laughing, though--everybody’s up now. You can hear it. You can feel it.

“Me? Are you kidding? I feel good !”