Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Ho, ho, ho!
Hee, hee, hee!
I’m about to laugh my head off!
The world has become such a ridiculous joke lately, I’m holding my sides and rolling on the floor.
But not everyone is laughing. A cursory review of the headlines in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal — or even in little online magazines like the Pagosa Daily Post — suggests that people are taking the state of the world far too seriously.
Come on, guys. Fascism can be funny! Hurricanes are hilarious! Starvation, side-splitting! Speaking personally, I’ve often been droll about droughts, gleeful about gun violence, and witty about wildfires.
There’s a perfectly good reason why something outrageously funny is called a “riot”.
And like a riot, laughter works best when people do it together. Humor is, at its heart, a social activity. Like setting cars on fire, but different. It’s all about the endorphins.
Speaking of endorphins, the Mayo Clinic has some thoughts about laughter. They recently published an article with the headline “Stress relief from laughter? It’s no joke”.
The article is informative, but unfortunately, not very funny. It reads like a physician talking, and we all know how ‘unfunny’ that can be.
A good laugh has great short-term effects. When you start to laugh, it doesn’t just lighten your load mentally, it actually induces physical changes in your body.
Laughter can:
Stimulate many organs. Laughter enhances your intake of oxygen-rich air, stimulates your heart, lungs and muscles, and increases the endorphins that are released by your brain.
Activate and relieve your stress response. A rollicking laugh fires up and then cools down your stress response, and it can increase and then decrease your heart rate and blood pressure. The result? A good, relaxed feeling.
Prior to coming across this Mayo Clinic article, I was blissfully unaware that I was stimulating my organs whenever I laughed. (Unfortunately, the article mentions only a couple of organs that are getting stimulated… but we can use our imaginations.)
I do sometimes notice the “good, relaxed feeling” that results from a healthy guffaw, but I hadn’t been connecting that feeling with my “stress response”. Typically, the times I feel stressed are not the same times when I feel like laughing. But scientists know more about this stuff then I do, so I’m going to let them believe what they want.
Apparently, there are also rather remarkable “long term effects” from laughing, to include pain relief.
Relieve pain. Laughter may ease pain by causing the body to produce its own natural painkillers.
Certainly, most of us have experience with “unnatural” painkillers. (You know what I’m talking about.) Did any of us know that the body produces its own natural painkillers?
Some researchers at the University of Oxford wanted to know “why laughter plays such an important role in our social lives” so they did what researchers always do: they put people in awkward situations and then measured their endorphin levels.
Endorphins, released by your brain, are believed to provide natural pain relief. Of course, the researchers first had find the pain threshold of their volunteer subjects, for example by wrapping the participant’s arm in a frozen wine-cooling sleeve, or by making the participant squat against a wall until they collapsed.
(Do not try this experiment at home. These were trained university scientists.)
Then the participants were gathered and exposed to funny clips from TV shows like “Mr. Bean” and “Friends”, which caused many of them to laugh. For some reason, humans are more likely to laugh when experiencing comedic situations in a social group. Laughter, unlike pain, is often contagious. (I sometimes wish people would read my humor columns in a group setting, but that hardly ever happens.)
Across all tests, the participants’ ability to tolerate pain jumped after laughing. On average, watching about 15 minutes of comedy in a group increased pain threshold by 10 percent.
Can we imagine what might happen if they had been allowed to laugh for 30 minutes? Let me enjoy “Friends” for half an hour and then just watch how long I can squat against a wall!
The researchers also tested some subjects in a solitary setting, alone. Not only did they laugh less; they also experienced less pain relief. Laughter is good medicine, but the medicine works best when we laugh together.
And speaking of laughing together, my editor found the photo below to illustrate today’s column, and I can’t help but wonder what these two men are talking about. Something funny, apparently.
Oh, the endorphins!
Ha, ha, ha!
Ho, ho, ho!
Hee, hee, hee!
Are you laughing with me? I hope so.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.