No one can deny the benefits of laughter with a straight face. Just smiling will make your day better and support your well-being. At a time when Americans are being threatened with all sorts of horrible consequences if we don’t speak and behave in particular ways, I'm thinking about the value of something deeply human that we all share in common: laughter.
When I taught at UCLA and in California high schools, my students and I cracked each other up on a regular basis. Laughing didn’t distract us from from doing our jobs – in fact, it made us better at everything we did.
How has there been exactly zero published research investigating the correlation between farting in class and academic performance? If someone could get the study approved and funded, I bet we’d discover that a well-timed fart in the classroom provides a great deal of insight about learning community culture. I also suspect that it would boost attendance and test scores more than AI and the education-trend-of-the-month (Common Core, Project Based Learning, Professional Learning Communities, take your pick) combined.
My informal, experiential research in the classroom is supported by peer-reviewed research in respectable academic publications, such as the journal of the American Physiological Society: “Humor is documented to build relationships and enhance performance. Specifically, humor
improves student performance by attracting and sustaining attention, reducing anxiety, enhancing participation, and increasing motivation. Moreover, humor stimulates multiple physiological systems that decrease levels of stress hormones, such as cortisol and epinephrine, and increase the activation of the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward system.”
Laughter is good for us. It creates physical, mental, and social benefits, and it feels fantastic, which is why laughter has been so important to humanity for so long. Laughter is also easy to find – if you’re looking for it. Funny is available 24/7, free of charge.
The Health Benefits of Laughter
Medical research has conclusively proven that laughter lowers cortisol, boosts our immune system, increases endorphins, and exercises at least ten different muscle groups, some of which massage our internal organs. Anyone who has ever laughed knows how good it feels. Laughter reduces stress and anxiety, regulates blood pressure, relieves pain, strengthens relationships, and makes us feel more optimistic and less overwhelmed.
For some health benefits, laughter even outperforms rest, diet, and exercise. Laughter reduces cortisol so effectively that researchers have recommended laughter as therapy. According to endocrinologists who conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of data from MEDLINE/PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Clinicaltrials.gov, “Current evidence demonstrates that spontaneous laughter is associated with greater reduction in cortisol levels as compared with usual activities, suggesting laughter as a potential adjunctive medical therapy to improve well-being.”
Medical doctors such as Patch Adams (the title character played by Robin Williams in the 1998 movie) have integrated the use of humor in treatment. Before Dr. Adams encouraged humor as practice, uncommon patients like Norman Cousins explored the benefits of laughter on their own.
In 1964, Cousins was diagnosed with ankloysing spondylitis, an autoimmune arthritis that fuses the spine and becomes incredibly debilitating and painful. Doctors gave Cousins a 1 in 500 chance of recovering and told him to get his affairs in order. Since the doctors couldn’t help him, Cousins started watching the Marx Brothers and episodes of Candid Camera – and he literally laughed himself well.
After Cousins recovered, he joined the UCLA School of Medicine faculty and 15 years after his diagnosis wrote Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration.
I met Cousins in 1988 after a talk he gave with Monty Python’s John Cleese on “New Dimensions in Healing” at UCLA (in Schoenberg Hall, on the same stage where I’d give a TEDx talk 24 years later). I sat by myself that night and I treated the event as a master class – I took pages and pages of notes. I came away thinking differently about why I love to laugh and how laughter can accelerate all sorts of good effects in people and social systems.
The bottom line: If something involves humor, it is healthier. The inverse is also true: if something doesn’t involve humor, it is unhealthier. That goes for a person, a relationship, a learning community, an organization, a culture, and a country.
The need for deeper understanding of this dynamic is massive, and Cousins left quite a legacy to meet it. He brought together leading experts in psychology, neurology, and immunology, formed a task force, and today the Norman Cousins Center for PsychoNeuroImmunology (PNI) at UCLA continues to expand what we know about this field, including mindfulness via the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center.
Laughter Has Been Around, You Know?
We’ve known that laughter is good medicine for centuries. Physicians in Ancient Greece sent their patients to comedy shows. Native Americans used clowns in shamanic rituals.
Even the Bible endorses laughter as a form of healing and well-being. Consider this quote from Proverbs: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.” And this one from Ecclesiastes: “A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, drink and be merry.”
Not as amusingly, for as long as there has been humor, there have been people who say things like, “Wipe that smile off your face.”
Even the Bible isn't immune from sanctimonious types who want to tell the rest of us what we're doing wrong. For example, according to the Billy Graham Evangelical Association: “The word ‘merry’ is from an old Anglo-Saxon word which sometimes meant ‘famous,’ ‘illustrious,’ ‘great,’ or ‘mighty.’ Originally, to be merry did not imply to be merely mirthful, but strong and gallant.”
Wuh? What Anglo-Saxon word was that? Who in their right mind wishes anyone “A strong and gallant Christmas”?
I fact-checked this on the Online Etymology Dictionary at etymonline (a website that provides a terrific free service and has the root for etymology – the study of the origin and evolution of words – right there in the URL).
Here is their entry for merry:
Nothing about strong or gallant. It’s easy to point out factual errors. But humor is subjective and standards of what’s acceptable are not the same in every community. So what happens when we’re talking about something that has the potential to hurt feelings, or is simply more subjective and personal, like what’s funny?
Breaking the Rules Is Funny
Humor plays on the margins. Often something strikes us as funny precisely because something is unexpected, out of context, or unacceptable in everyday life. Jokes depend on twists of focus, double meanings, grammatical errors, profanity, and taboo topics. Whether it’s innocent, like the guy that pops up out of the mailbox in Candid Camera, or risqué, (Jordan Jensen’s new Netflix special will make you cringe at least once every four minutes), the out-of-the-ordinary and the irregular make us laugh.
When people with political or physical power of enforcement tell us that we are not allowed to laugh at something particular, everything is ruined. Apart from the fact that bullies have notoriously thin skin, some of the best comedy we’ve ever heard – and even the identity of comedy itself – depends on speaking the edgy truth to power in public. Comedians routinely share frank acknowledgements and explicit descriptions of intimate or institutional topics that at one time or another were considered off-limits. Social satire couldn’t exist without criticism – Swift, Twain, Shaw, Mencken and others serve a rich tradition that dates back to antiquity. Court jesters (also known as fooles) not only provided entertainment in empires around the world, they also served as political advisors. Maybe that’s why George Carlin titled one of his albums Occupation: Foole. Some of the best standups make their living on topics that are first-date taboo: sex, religion, and politics.
During that talk with Norman Cousins, John Cleese made a couple observations about what makes jokes funny. First, Cleese noted that some of the most effective humor probes topics that we avoid in polite conversation. “In England,” Cleese said, “Everyone is very stiff. You almost don’t want to ask what’s new, for fear that someone will tell you how their house burned down and their children died.” And yet, comedians have stood up on stage and shared intimate remembrances of misfortune and even harm to children – and gotten huge laughs. Richard Pryor is widely regarded as one of the most talented and influential standup comedians of all time. Pryor told audiences about his mother, who was a prostitute, and his father, who was a pimp; he recounted the sexual and physical abuse he experienced as a child; how he got kicked out school and spent time in prison for attacking fellow soldiers in the U.S. Army; and how he set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine. Pryor was authentic, and he made all of that traumatic subject matter unbelievably funny because audience members could relate to private feelings about sexuality, race, and drugs that they were unaccustomed to hearing out loud and in public.
Cleese also pointed out that many of the best jokes include personal and human characters, even if the specific representations may insult a person or a group of people: “A joke simply doesn’t work if you say, ‘One stupid person says to another stupid person…’” Cleese noted that jokes play on our prior knowledge and anticipation, and that every culture has an “other” that becomes the stereotypical butt of a joke. (Please Note: I understand that Cleese’s point is a sensitive one in today’s world and I’m not endorsing hurting anyone.) In Maui, it’s the people who lived upcountry on Haleakala, near Kula. At times in Europe and America it was the Polish. Or blondes. The list goes on: The Jewish Wise Men of Chelm, the English Wise Men of Gotham, the German Schildbürger, and so on. Without an audience or context, it doesn’t really matter who it is, and it doesn’t even matter whether they are real or invented for the purpose. The point is that saying, “A priest, a rabbi, and a cowboy walk into a bar…” is a more illustrative, engaging way to start a story than saying, “A person, another person, and a third person walk into a bar…”
These days, one of the safest and most effective ways for comedians to talk about the edgiest topics is to make themselves the center of the story. Recent specials on Netflix feature Mike Birbiglia, Lauren Larson, Neal Brennan, and many other standup comics talking about their own health issues, neuroses and therapy, bodily functions, and family members in ways that simply wouldn’t play the same – or maybe at all – if they were talking about anyone else.
Society Needs Laughter
Laughter is freedom. Laughter is restorative resilience, a shared reminder that many of life’s daily concerns are absurd and that we’re not getting out of life alive anyway. For these reasons, humor is one of the most effective weapons against authoritarian rule. Laughing at a bully takes away their power. Laughing at their most awful threats takes away their psychological leverage: "Sure, you can fire me or sue me or even imprison and torture me... but you're still a dick, and everyone knows it."
Satirists have championed free speech and challenged the status quo in ways that benefit all of us –whatever our identity, socioeconomic status, or position on a particular issue. The value of satirical commentary is its ability to address societal needs for improvement while engaging the audience. At its best, it’s also bitingly funny. Satire also serves as a Rorschach test. You can tell who’s on what side of the issue by how they respond. Think about the political leaders in our country and the people in your social circles. Who among them would laugh about and/or support a policy paper like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”?
It's telling that we don't currently have anything like "A Modest Proposal." Imagine a satirical topic updated for the issues and sensitivities of our day – The Onion tiptoes to the edge with a call for mass censorship that is intended to be absurd, but many commentators are avoiding policies, events, and behavior that richly deserve to be satirized because today's America is not a very safe place and they understandably fear for their safety.
When fundamentalists and authoritarian leaders feel most threatened, they rage at humor.
In 2015, two gunmen murdered 12 people and injured 11 others at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Here in America, Lenny Bruce was persecuted for his “caustic social commentary.” George Carlin (who I think outranks both Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker as the most important American linguist of the 20th century) was arrested by an off-duty police officer at a carnival in Milwaukee because the officer took offense to Carlin’s act. The judge laughed through the entire proceeding and threw the matter out of court.
But the FCC took the matter further when Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say On Television” was broadcast on a New York City radio station. FCC v. Pacifica went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the FCC could not ban indecent speech, but could establish a “safe harbor” that limited the hours when it could be broadcast.
While I was working on my Ph.D. at UCLA, I taught sections of Communication Studies 101: Freedom of Communication. In weekly readings, lectures, and (my specialty) seminars, we analyzed speech that is not covered by the First Amendment, such as speech that causes immediate/irreparable harm to the nation or its people, hate speech and words that have the effect of force, incitement, and obscenity/indecency.
For speech to be considered legally obscene or indecent, and therefore to be considered beyond the protection of the First Amendment, it has to do more than simply upset someone. The Supreme Court has described how difficult it is to establish an objective standard of what is obscene. In a 1964 ruling that prevented the state of Ohio from banning a movie about adultery, Associate Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
I’m glad that Stewart set a personally relevant high bar to ban speech. But Stewart passed away in 1981. Who on the Supreme Court (or anywhere else) “knows it when they see it” now?
The court later established the three-pronged Miller Test test for obscenity (named after the defendant in Miller v. California). To be considered obscene, material must appeal to prurient interest, contain patently offensive sexual material, and lack serious artistic, literary, political, or scientific value. Again, there is room for subjective interpretation here, but at least there are guidelines that can form the basis for argumentation. When you understand how the courts weigh cases and evidence, you start to understand why your English teacher told you to write a clear thesis and back it up with quotes from the text you were supposed to read for homework.
We need some common guardrails around punishing speech, because the real problem with punishing speech – apart from denying the free expression that English religious fanatics craved so badly that they sailed across the Atlantic and killed the Native Americans for it – is that punishing anyone for speaking out has a “chilling effect” on the rest of us.
When people don’t know what’s OK to say or what’s going to get them in trouble, they go quiet. You might think that’s a good thing. Finally a little peace, right? Maybe your neighbor should get arrested for playing that crap music so loud. But that’s missing the whole point of the First Amendment. The First Amendment does not favor pearl-clutching, complaining, or outrage. The 1995 movie American President put it this way:
"You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the ‘land of the free.’”
Society Needs Authenticity
Neither George Carlin nor Richard Pryor became successful until they stopped trying to be what they thought audiences wanted them to be, and they started being themselves – even if that meant pissing people off.
How do we learn to be authentic? What makes people comfortable showing us who they really are? The perceived right to express themselves. The freer people are to express themselves, the more likely they are to show us who they are. That’s my favorite thing about the First Amendment – I would rather someone reveal their racist, fundamentalist, nationalist, incel, jackboot insanity that walk around among us masquerading as a sensible citizen. (Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the press, and freedom to assemble or petition the government for a redress of grievances is a solid second-place.)
That last statement may be more important than you think. Authenticity saves lives.
When I taught, it would have been impossible for students and I not to notice if one of us was building so much internal tension that they might actually consider self-harm or violence. We talked too much in person and we posted too much online for that to happen. We saw each other and we listened to each other. We got to know each other. When someone went quiet or said/posted something that clanked, we cared enough to ask questions. The members of our community felt like they could communicate authentically without being shamed for their honesty. Exchanges were often serious and vulnerable, but when something was truly funny – even if it was also awful – we laughed with our whole selves until we had to wipe away the tears. We built memories and relationships around those moments.
When Art Imitates Life
John Cleese isn’t the only law graduate to become a comedic entertainer. After getting involved in theatre during law school, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky became publicly known when he appeared on an improvisational comedy show called “Club of the Funny and Inventive People.” Zelensky became the star of a show called Servant of the People, in which he played a history teacher who becomes an internet sensation after a student posts a video of him ranting against governmental corruption. Then he really did, in real life. I imagine Zelensky has relied on humor to keep his sanity on more than a few occasions during a horribly tragic time in his life and his country's history.
More people from all walks of life would be better off if they could enjoy safe spaces for laughter. I think my old friend Ed Greenberg is a national treasure for the work he and his team do at Laughter for a Change.
When Life Threatens Art
Two late night television hosts, both known for their humorous monologues and long careers in parody, satire, emceeing, and joke-telling (i.e., not serious policy makers or political leaders), were fired in recent months because they said things that didn’t favor the current presidential administration, which is known for threatening and suing companies into submission.
You may not like what they said. I may not like what they said. I didn't even hear what they said, and I don't care what they said, because content is beside the point. Ask three people whether or not what they said was funny and you’ll get five different answers.
What matters more than the speech itself is ensuring that free expression has a place in our country. America has always been seen as a unique "experiment" – a country founded on ideals. In the very first Presidential inaugural speech, George Washington put it this way: "The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."
The success of the American Experiment as a representative democracy depends directly on the idea that people should be able to freely express themselves in speech and writing, even when – especially when – that means criticizing the government.
Preserving that tradition is the key to a more satisfying, enjoyable life, i.e., a life set to the soundtrack of laughter.
In the library of St. John’s College, Oxford, there is a manuscript of revels and dramatic pieces that were performed by students in the Christmas season of 1607, 182 years before Washington gave that inaugural speech, 381 years before I met Norman Cousins, and 418 years before I sat down to write this article. Several of the works show the influence of Shakespeare’s new play King Lear, which some of the students would have seen just a few months earlier when it was presented at Oxford.
Whether it was Shakespeare’s portrayal of a king’s madness, hypocrisy, and seemingly endless need for flattery, or whether one of the Oxford students came to this insightful one-liner on their own, they gave us timeless gift:
Laugh on laugh on my friend
Hee laugheth best that laugheth to the end
Translated: He who laughs last, laughs best.
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Was it a fart at a funeral? A joke about divorce? What made you laugh at an unexpected or inappropriate moment? Drop me a line – I’m curious!
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Curiosity is worth practicing. That’s how we get better at it. When it’s done particularly well, curiosity can be elevated to an art form. Curiosity makes life worth living. I am literally Curious AF. And now you can be too! Click HERE to unlock your free membership subscription.
Here is a taste of what I’m doing, reading, watching, and thinking about.
What I’m Reading –
I don't know who's responsible for this (the oil/gas lobby? Engineering crybabies at Porsche and Ferrari?), but maybe it's the beginning of automotive journalism that will help me understand why pickups have gotten so insanely big, or why the Tesla truck thing exists at all. From Wired Magazine, EVs Have Gotten Too Powerful: "When an entry-level Volvo can get to 60 mph quicker than a Porsche 911, and in the same time as a Ferrari, electric car makers need a reset."
What I’m Watching –
Arthur Brooks is a professor of happiness at Harvard University. In this five-minute video he makes a great case for a simple strategy that will make you happier: You Need to Be Bored.
Quote I’m pondering –
I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
- Dante Alighieri
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David Preston
Educator & Author
Latest book: ACADEMY OF ONE
Header image: "Keying Up" - The Court Jester. William Merritt Chase, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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