Having a Good Laugh

The dozen men and women, many strangers to one another, are gathered on a patch of grass in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, looking a bit nervous about what they might have gotten themselves into. They are standing in a loosely formed circle when Kim Corbin, dressed in bluejeans and a T-shirt that says “Think Globally, Laugh Locally,” asks them to hold hands.

She raises a silvery wand like an orchestra conductor: “Ho, ho, ha-ha-ha!” she bellows. “Ho, ho, ha-ha-ha!”

The group gets the idea. “Ho, ho, ha-ha-ha, ho, ho, ha-ha-ha,” they say, knowing how silly they look--but gradually realizing being silly doesn’t really hurt. What begins as a stifled effort at jollity soon dissolves into spontaneous giggling. Then, it’s out and out laughter, prancing-around-in-the-grass kind of laughing. Laughter that makes you feel good even when you don’t have a good reason.

Corbin, 32, is a “certified laughter leader”--neither comedian nor humorist but a specialist in pure laughter. And she’s just getting started with this group. On her command, the members pounce at each other, grunting loudly, wagging their tongues and pawing the air with imaginary claws.

This, explains Corbin, is “lion laughter,” one of about a dozen techniques she teaches. Next comes “chicken skip laughter”--everyone breaks out into titters, moving their upper arms sideways, like birds flapping wings. There’s also “silent laughter”--mouths open wide with chuckles, but no sound is produced.

Except for Corbin, nobody in the group has ever laughed this way before.

“It feels great to be connected with everyone,” gushes Misha Knowles, a 21-year-old professional skater. Says Barry Marcus, 46, a network administrator, “I’m a laugh-oriented person but I have to say I’ve never laughed so hard before.”

To an outsider, the first impression suggests that this is some kind of crazy congregation: laughing for no evident reason other than perhaps the fact that after days of depressing, rainy weather, San Francisco has been blessed with an unusually sunny Sunday afternoon. “Very San Francisco,” says a passerby on hearing the exaggerated laughter. “Only in San Francisco.”

San Francisco may be one of the easiest cities in which to hang loose, but it isn’t the only place where people meet for no reason other than to laugh their heads off. Across much of the United States, Americans are participating in a curious new phenomenon--some call it a movement--dedicated to laughing for happier, healthier and fuller lives. Many of them meet in public parks or in apartments to giggle, guffaw, chuckle, chortle, screech or titter--anything to surrender to uninhibited laughter.

They’re by no means the first to do so. Decades ago, author Norman Cousins launched something of a nationwide movement focused on the healing art of laughter when he evidently cured himself of a degenerative spinal disease by taking huge doses of vitamin C and watching Marx Brothers comedies. “I made the joyous discovery,” wrote Cousins in “Anatomy of an Illness,” the 1979 book about his dramatic recovery, “that 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter had a salutary effect on the body’s chemistry.” Cousins famously called laughter “inner jogging,” equating the primal emotion with physical exercise.

The current laughter trend differs from Cousins’ in one significant sense: It doesn’t at all rely on what psychologists call “cognitive events,” such as comedies, humor or jokes.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t therapeutic. “We can lower stress hormones in the body through mirthful laughter regardless of how we do it,” says Lee Berk, a professor of complementary medicine at UC Irvine and an authority on laughter.

The man behind America’s guffawing craze is Steve Wilson, 61, a cherubic psychologist from Columbus, Ohio, who, in turn, was inspired by Madan Kataria, 46, a physician far away in Bombay, India. The “guru of giggling,” as Kataria is called, has earned international renown for forming or helping launch some 1,000 “laughter clubs” in India and another 150 or so in Europe, Australia, the far East and lately, the United States.

He came up with the idea of laughter clubs in 1995 after years of observing that his patients’ immune systems improved dramatically following bouts of laughter, even the forced kind. Kataria initially enlisted friends to crack jokes every morning at the first club he launched in a Bombay public park. But the group soon ran out of material. The doctor then developed a technique of “thought-free” group laughter based on yoga.

Kataria’s hee-haw phenomenon is the subject of a recent documentary film, “The Laughing Club of India,” directed by Indian-born filmmaker Mira Nair, whose other credits include “Salaam Bombay” and “Monsoon Wedding,” to be released next month. The “Laughing Club of India” profiles Kataria and several members of his Bombay club, notably the matriarch of a 38-member family and two retired men with a penchant for silent laughter. The documentary begins with a group of workers standing silently in a circle in a Bombay electronics factory. At the count of three, everybody takes a deep breath, raises their arms, and explodes into seemingly senseless laughter. “At first you feel sort of foolish and then you get carried away by the rhythm of it,” says Nair, who herself succumbed to Bombay’s laughter contagion while directing her film.

Nair, a resident of New York City, made the 35-minute documentary following a trip to Bombay in January 1999. She was stuck in a nasty traffic jam one morning in the polluted metropolis and was really fuming when she spotted some 2,000 women marching and laughing on the road. “My anger melted away. It was like being in a Fellini movie,” she says. It was “World Laughter Day,” first celebrated one year earlier. It was celebrated for the first time in the U.S. last spring. The event’s backers now plan it as an annual event to be observed on the first Sunday in May--the 5th of the month this year.

Wilson found Bombay’s laughter phenomenon equally fascinating. When he met Kataria in the city in 1998, the doctor urged him to spread the message of laughter in America. The Iowan jumped at the opportunity, delighted by the idea of unadulterated, interactive laughter. “There are a lot of people who have an innate sense that laughter is a good thing,” he says. “But they don’t necessarily want to turn on the TV and see a comedian.”

So in the summer of 1998, Wilson co-founded the World Laughter Tour, www.worldlaughtertour .com, an umbrella group for laughter clubs in North America. Two years later, he began coaching laughter leaders in two-day weekend workshops held monthly in Columbus, Ohio. The seminars, costing $289 per student, cover everything from laughter techniques to overcoming the fear of appearing silly while laughing--a key lesson.

So far, Wilson has certified 225 laughter leaders, ages 16 to 84, from the U.S. and Canada. He estimates that about two-thirds of them are at work leading as many as 150 weekly laughter sessions in North America.

Participants are usually recruited through Internet postings and by word of mouth. A typical organized laughing session lasts 20 to 30 minutes, beginning with a light warmup and some deep breathing yoga exercises. Thereafter, participants indulge in a variety of laughter techniques such as “elephant laughter” (hold one arm above the head as if it were a pachyderm’s trunk and grunt like an elephant trumpeting) and “monkey laughter” (place feet wide apart, bend forward and laugh while scratching the underarms). Wilson’s messengers of mirth constantly come up with hilarious new forms of laughter. Examples include the “Pillsbury Dough Boy laugh” (mutual poking of stomachs as if testing bread dough) and the “mad scientist laugh.”

At the Golden Gate Park gathering last month, one participant introduced the “Austin Powers laugh”--incorporating the trademark snicker of the character’s nemesis, Dr. Evil, with pinkie placed alongside the mouth.

Unlike in India, where people mostly laugh to keep in good health, Americans primarily focus on what New Yorker Dana Flynn calls the “direct experience of laughter.”

Flynn, 39, is a yoga instructor who leads the “Laughing Lotus” club once a week on an apartment rooftop in Greenwich Village. It’s an occasion dedicated to 20 minutes of guffawing. But for Flynn, it’s the “sound of the soul waking up--it connects us to those parts of ourselves we’re separated with.”

Not everybody wants to laugh for enlightenment, though. Take Debbie Smith, 48, a resident of Darlington, Ind., who’s planning to sign up for Wilson’s workshop this year. Besides working for Ameritech, Smith owns a bed-and-breakfast, a riding stable and a horse-carriage company. “When you live on a farm and think you’re the only one who steps in doo, it can be depressing,” she says. “You just have to be able to laugh or you’d sit down and cry and nobody would care.”

Smith is also campaigning for laughter therapy to be introduced in the National Guard, where her husband, Jim, works. “It’s a stressful time for military families right now,” she says. “Laughter is a good way to look at the world through a different angle.”

In fact, some authorities on mirth believe that humans may be the only ones on the planet capable of laughter--and that there’s no such thing as a humorless person. Everybody can crack up, whether in a club or in the quiet of a bedroom, turning laughter into a joyful form of meditation.

“It should be a way of life,” says Wilson, whose experience has been so rewarding that he no longer practices psychotherapy. In the summer of 2000, he closed his clinic, ending his 40-year career as a psychologist. “I decided the world didn’t need a full-time psychologist,” he laughs. “What it needs is a full-time ‘joyologist.’”