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Vice Blog

NEWSFLASH: LAUGHTER IS GOOD

Illustration by George Vaughn Wills

Steve Wilson is a self-proclaimed laughter expert. If you ask, he'll tell you that he's a gelotology researcher and "the world's only joyologist." Steve takes laughter so seriously that he created a six-step program called the World Laughter Tour, in which he teaches people all over the world how to find their own inner yuks and guffaws. He was kind enough to stop laughing for a few minutes recently so that he could sit down with us and discuss the minutiae of chuckles.

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Vice: What's your favorite joke?
Steve Wilson: Here's a current favorite: There's three guys in a small town and they are totally strapped for cash. They don't know what to do. They're sitting around talking about it and they decide the thing to do is to rob the bank. So they start to make their plans and realize at the local bank that everyone knows everyone else so they're going to have to wear masks. So they get pistols and masks and go into the bank in the middle of the day. They get everyone lined up against the wall and they start going through the cash drawers. One guy's mask falls off. He quickly puts it on and wonders, "I wonder if anybody saw me?" So he walks over and there's a man standing there. He points a gun at him and says, "Did you see me?" The man says, "Yes, John. I saw you." And he shoots him. There's a woman standing next to him and he says, "Did you see me?" And she says, "No, no. I didn't see you, but my husband did."

[silence]

OK… I don't know. Did that come across on the phone?

I got it.
OK…

How did you first get into gelotology?
Well, Norman Cousins was this brilliant man who wrote Anatomy of an Illness, which detailed his own struggle with crippling diseases and the recovery program he developed to fight them. Basically it was just a mix of megadoses of vitamin C and laughter. He recovered from what should have been a fatal experience. He thought that immersing himself in humor, company, and Marx Brothers movies had a lot to do with his healing. That book really started it all. My colleagues and I began toying with the idea that a sense of humor was not something you were born with but something that develops in a lifetime, and maybe we could help people develop a better one.

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And what would be the benefits of developing a sense of humor?
If you can find a humorous perspective on something it's automatically less threatening. You can grapple with it a little bit better. I've heard cancer patients say that humor made the unbearable a little more bearable. If you find something humorous it's very personal. It's your particular funny bone that's tickled and it may not be the same as anybody else's. Anyway, Norman Cousins raised a lot of money and got himself on the faculty of the medical school of UCLA—he really wanted to study what the heck is happening when you laugh. He turned out to be pretty on point in thinking that laughing is a universal ability that all human beings are born with it. It's in your brain, your central nervous system. But humor, on the other hand, is personal, subjective, specific to culture, personal beliefs, and language. The science started to be about people laughing. If a person is laughing, we can draw a little blood from them and analyze the blood content and see if it's different from somebody else who is not laughing.

That really works?
Well, I'm oversimplifying it, but that's essentially what they did. Some of the early studies showed changes in stress hormones, things that allowed the immune system to function more efficiently. Certain stress hormones can actually make you sick if they stay in your blood system too long. We now know that the physical act of laughing seems to throw switches inside your body, reducing these hormones. It improves immune functions, has cardiovascular effects, and relieves stress.

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And laughter is a good way to release the constant, crushing, obliterating, all-powerful psychic and emotional pain that we're all feeling every day?
Exactly. As a society we are not on very good terms with our unpleasant emotions. We tend to repress, deny, and ignore them. Anger, fear, guilt, depression, resentment, panic. We just don't deal well with things that are unpleasant. Laughter seems to throw the switches. Every system in your body is healthy when you have a laugh. Now, I want to qualify something. You can smoke pot and get the giggles, you could be a happy drunk, you can inhale laughing gas, and you can inhale the fumes of manganese when it's cooking in a glass-making operation. All these things will produce laughter, but substance-induced laughter does not have the same effect as true, mirthful laughter.

So it has to come from within?
And from a particular kind of humor or comedy. It is very important for us to realize that there isn't one sense of humor. If there were only "a" sense of humor, there would only be one comic strip in the newspaper. But there are 20 different comic strips because we don't all share the same constellation, the same several senses of humor. It varies in our mood or the particular company we are with. Some people love the Three Stooges. Some people hate the Three Stooges.

I hate the fucking Three Stooges. Hate.
It's different jokes for different folks.

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That would make a good t-shirt.
It gives me a great deal of respect for humorists and comedians who can seem to find some common sense of humor in thousands or millions of people. To me, that is a high art.

So your interest in gelotology led you to create the World Laughter Tour, a seminar with the core message of, "Hey, chill the heck out and let yourself laugh for once in your miserable, shitty life."
Well, I was working with different organizations on how to improve productivity and morale by improving attitudes in the workforce. There was a foundation sending American business people to India to teach them some of our ideas, and I was invited to go and do some lectures. I hooked up with some of the people there who were doing these laughter exercises. It turns out that in the Far East, practicing pure laughter has been around for thousands of years. Tibetan monks were doing it. Statues of Ho-Tai, the Laughing Buddha, are everywhere. That's when I decided to start the World Laughter Tour and pull it all together. I have a lot of experience in activity therapy, like in music and art. Those are pretty well accepted here, so I thought we could have laugh therapy because people under stress and pressure are forgetting to laugh. We have a culture, American culture, rooted in Puritan Protestantism. It was the pilgrims coming over with their religious beliefs that said hard work and no amusement. When you're laughing at work and the boss comes over and says, "Hey! Get back to work. We're not here to have fun!" I just think that's a complete 180 from where we should be. So my work is to educate people and turn this around. A lot of people come to our laughter clubs and programs just to learn to become comfortable letting it out when they feel like laughing! It's what we were born to do!

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How does the program work?
Well, the goal is to promote goodhearted living, to prevent the hardening of attitudes. The six steps are associated with a day of the week. Obviously you can do these any day of the week, but we want to go from mindfulness, to habit, to a way of life. Mondays are for paying compliments. That's the antidote for being critical and judgmental. To make compliments you have to be looking for what's good. Tuesdays are for flexibility—the antidote for rigidity. There is an Asian proverb that says, "The tree that bends in the wind doesn't break." Wednesdays are for gratitude. Gratitude is the antidote for despair and self-pity. I use this little poem that says, "As you go through life, let this always be your goal, keep your eye upon the donut, not upon the hole." Thursdays are for acts of kindness. I came across something recently that said you are healthier when you think kind thoughts. It changes this part of your central nervous system called the autonomic nervous system. It turns out that doing kind things switches on that parasympathetic nervous system. I think that's amazing! Fridays are for forgiveness, letting go of anger. That's one of the main psychological dynamics of forgiveness. And the weekends… are for chocolate! Obviously chocolate is symbolic and metaphoric and not literal, although for some people it's literal. But I read that the average American spends 14 hours a weekend doing things like grocery shopping, laundry, and paying bills. We've lost our weekend. Plan for the sweet things in life. Make it a sacred time. I became known as the joyologist years ago because I was teaching a philosophy of life that was called "Don't Postpone Joy."

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Your website mentions something about interactive simulated laughing. How does that work? Everyone sits in a friendship circle and laughs at nothing?
It's not so much simulated as an attempt to find our inner laughter. The laughter exercises are simply familiar activities like shaking hands or waving and then adding laughter to the movement.

I just got chills.
Humor is so subjective it would be very difficult to lead a group of people into jokes. We don't use conventional comedy or humor, but a light kind of silly activity. It's a combination of teaching and giving permission. Zingers may have hurt you because there is a certain kind of humor that's hurtful. A lot of people are walking around still wounded from seventh grade.

Gelotophobia, right? The fear of being laughed at?
Right. In ancient times the king had a court jester and he could get away with all kinds of jokes because he lifted the king's spirits. But today, no way! No one wants to look foolish. So in our laughter sessions there is no criticism, no judgments. We laugh with each other. I think each of us carries within ourselves the sound of a primal laugh. Some Native Americans revere the first laugh that the infant has, and if you're the adult that is present when the baby first laughs, then you become the laughter godparent. They have ceremonies and rituals honoring this child's laughter and the person who was with them when they had it.

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Give me an example of how you laugh without any sort of humor involved. It sounds incredibly uncomfortable.
Are you some place where nobody's watching?

Actually, I'm in an all-glass conference room in the middle of our office.
[laughing] OK. Get your face into a smile, let your shoulders relax, and maybe you and I could have a chuckle together. It's easy for me because I've been practicing for years. [full-bellied diabolical laughing from him, extremely awkward attempt from me]

See, spontaneous, unrehearsed laughter is the best kind. In a group it's contagious. When you hear true, mirthful laughter you start to get a little warm feeling inside yourself. If I'm having a mirthful laugh then a certain part of my brain is activated and you hear that, and it activates the corresponding part in your brain. So I'm sending you vibes! Then you start to feel like laughing. We're moving toward understanding how human beings can influence each other almost at a vibrational kind of level.

So do you think you spend more time laughing than the typical person?
No, no, no. I'm not sitting around laughing all the time. We're estimating these days that there is a recommended daily allowance of laughter that you ought to get. I'm putting it at 15 minutes total, not all at once. Now, I've estimated—this is very unscientific research—with my own stopwatch that when a person hears a joke and laughs, they laugh for about three and a half seconds. If you only use jokes in order to get your quota, you'd need something like 300 new jokes a day. It turns out that Robert Provine, a scientist in this field, estimates that 90 percent of your lifetime laughter is going to come from social interactions and only 10 percent is going to come from comedy and jokes. Human beings talk to each other and laugh. It shows friendship and cooperation and understanding. It's what human beings do when they feel comfortable with one another.

Who's your favorite comedian?
Any John Candy movie is good for me. I especially like some kind of intellectual humor, but Jersey Shore—I'm laughing at that. I think that's a hoot. George Carlin, too. Somebody once said there are two sure rules for making something funny, unfortunately no one knows what they are.

Good one.
I think that really says it. The bottom line is somebody has a particular wit and intellect and perspective on the world that just brings it into focus for so many of us. Jon Stewart does that.

I'm curious—if you could imagine a world without laughter, what would it feel like to you?
Oh, I've thought about it. If there was no evidence that laughter was good for you, even if it didn't have any health benefits, it still just feels good. I want my life filled with laughter because a life without it is dreadful.

Last question: What about fart jokes? Do you like those?
There's a proud history in my family of fart jokes.

Mine too! Farts!

ELLIS JONES