Laughter is not a joke
Go ahead, laugh. Laugh for no reason at all. Laugh your head off.
People will think you’re nuts, but don’t mind them, says Dr. Madan Kataria, founder of the worldwide Laughter Club movement. Others thought him crazy too when he tried to round up fellow citizens for a group laughter session at his neighborhood park in Bombay. That spring day in 1995, he found only four converts. However, each time they met, more people who recognized their mirth deficit decided to join.
Since then his gospel has spread like wildfire, first throughout India, then to Europe and Asia, and most recently North America, with a new club in Pasadena. Southern California’s first official Laugh-In is scheduled for Sunday, designated World Laughter Day, in Altadena’s Farnsworth Park, with comedian Mike Marino officiating. Attendees will be led through laugh exercises and listen to music and calls for world peace, which is Kataria’s ultimate goal.
Today the movement claims about 5,000 clubs worldwide, some of which meet in parks, some in classrooms, and some even at companies and factories where bosses have come to see the advantages of giving employees a laugh break. (The Pasadena chapter is one of three Southern California clubs; the others are in Encinitas and Ventura.) Kataria and his wife and collaborator, Madhuri, have hopped across five continents -- lecturing, teaching, leading laugh sessions.
This evening his forum is a studio at Yoga Kingdom Sanctuary in Altadena. A somewhat portly man with a mop of hennaed hair, he wears a black velvet jacket over a T-shirt featuring a picture of himself and his wife, laughing. He faces a friendly group of 70 people, ranging from two small and rambunctious children to an elderly gentleman who must be helped into his seat. Attendees have left their shoes outside and sit on the floor, in a scimitar arc around the 49-year-old Kataria.
Sometimes sitting, sometimes pacing, Kataria explains how he came to found the Laughter Club. Ten years ago he read extensively about the benefits of laughter to write an article, “Laughter -- the Best Medicine,” for a health magazine. He says he found that laughing helped reduce stress, improve blood circulation, massage the internal organs and, in general, perk up the human spirit.
One day he went to his local park to see if he could interest others in practicing laughter.
“At first we told jokes,” he says. “After 10 days, our stock of jokes ran out.”
So he began to devise exercises in which people would laugh, with or without jokes.
“We have this saying, ‘Fake it till you make it.’ Normally we use this sentence in some other context,” he quips, drawing a round of chuckles. “It doesn’t matter whether you are really laughing or not. You will still get the benefits.”
Look at children, he says, who laugh all the time. “But as we get older, we laugh less, we have more stress and inhibitions.”
The exercises are designed to break down those inhibitions so that we can laugh more easily, more fully. “We do laughter as a form of exercise at the beginning, then it turns into real laughter very quickly,” he says.
Sebastien Gendry, founder of the Pasadena chapter, says there are different levels of involvement. Last year he discovered Kataria on the Web and was so excited by what he read that he hopped on a plane to Bombay to enroll in a training session with him.
But “you can just come and be entertained,” Gendry says of the sessions. “However, in the long run, it helps you change your attitude. When you go through laughter yoga, you reprogram yourself to react positively, regardless of the environment.”
Though many Laughter Clubs in India meet daily, the Pasadena club meets once a week on Friday nights.
The meetings have a format. Attendees warm up by vigorously chanting “ho-ho-hahaha” while rhythmically clapping their hands. They then practice different laughs indicated by the leader, generally someone trained by Kataria or one of his trainees. In between are rest periods or deep-breathing exercises, as suggested by yoga, Madhuri Kataria’s specialty.
Among the growing list of laughs promoted by the club is “hearty laughter,” done with the arms raised and the head tilted backward. “Greeting laughter” involves participants holding their hands in a prayer (or namaste) position and bowing to one another. In “lion laughter,” people laugh with eyes wide open and the tongue fully extended.
Contemporary nuances have crept into their lexicon. There’s “cellphone laughter,” in which one holds a make-believe cellphone to the ear. And “Visa bill laughter,” in which one holds up a palm as if it were a credit card bill and points an admonishing finger at it with the other hand.
When the Pasadena crowd gets up and starts wagging fingers at one another in “argument laughter,” people really start to crack up.
Indeed, there’s plenty of humor in Kataria’s presentation too. He doesn’t tell jokes, but he’s a natural-born storyteller and has a wry way of phrasing things. Even his wife admits, beaming, “Yes, he’s a very funny man.”
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Southern California Laugh-In
What: Held by the American School of Laughter Yoga, the event marks World Laughter Day. The school regularly meets for free sessions, 6 to 7 p.m. Fridays at Yoga Kingdom Sanctuary, 553 S. Lake Ave., Pasadena.
Where: Farnsworth Park, 568 E. Mount Curve Ave., Altadena
When: 10 a.m. to noon Sunday
Price: Free
Info: (626) 755-5999; www.laughteryoga.us