Nature’s Cures:

Healing Humor:
Those Who Laugh, Last

“Life is too serious to be taken too seriously.” Joel Goodman

In 1976, Joel Goodman, Ed.D., learned that his father had been hospitalized in Texas with a coronary aneurysm, a form of heart disease that seriously threatened his life. Goodman, a corporate consultant in Saratoga Springs, New York, dropped everything and flew to Houston to be with his mother during his father’s surgery, an operation the doctors said he might not survive.

Every morning, Goodman and his mother took a shuttle van from their hotel to the hospital. “The driver was named Alvin,” Goodman recalls. “He was a comedian and a magician. My mother and I were rigid with fear, but on the five-minute drive to the hospital, Alvin told jokes and did magic tricks—and worked wonders for us. He made us laugh, and for a few moments, we could let go of our tension.”

“Once you find the humor in a situation, you can survive it.” Bill Cosby

In 1978, Allen Klein’s wife, Ellen, lay dying of cancer in a San Francsico hospital. Somehow, a copy of Playgirl magazine found its way to her bedside. On a whim, she pulled out the male nude centerfold and asked her husband to tape it to the wall.

“Isn’t it a bit risqué for a hospital?” asked Klein, a businessman who was 40 at the time.

“Nonsense,” Ellen replied. “Just take a leaf from that plant over there and cover up the genitals.”

Klein did as his wife requested. The leaf worked for the first say, and the second, but by the third it had begun to shrivel. Little by little, it revealed what it had been intended to conceal.

“Every time we glanced at that dried-up leaf,” Klein recalls, “we laughed. Our laughter lasted only a few seconds, but it brought us together. It revived us, and made our troubles easier to bear.”

“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient
while nature cures the disease.” Voltaire

In 1964, Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins was suddenly hospitalized with severe pain, paralysis, and gavel-like nodules under his skin. Eventually, his illness was diagnosed as ankyosing spondylitis, a serious form of arthritis. Cousins’ doctor said his chance of recovery was one in 500. A specialist called that optimistic—he’d never seen anyone recover from the disease.

Cousins was no doctor, but he was not entirely medically naive. His magazine had published several articles on discoveries that were new at the time, discoveries showing that the emotions have a profound impact on health. Negative emotions impaired the body’s ability to function and heal. (Today, this field is called mind-body medicine—see Chapter XX, “Mind-Body Healing.”)

Cousins figured that if negative emotions hurt the body, perhaps a large dose of positive emotions might help him heal. Given his grim prognosis, he had nothing to lose. He began his unorthodox self-treatment program by asking his visitors to bring him joke books. Despite his pain and difficulty moving, he found himself laughing uproariously, particularly at E.B. and Katharine White’s Subtreasury of American Humor and The Enjoyment of Laughter by Max Eastman. (He also took 25,000 mg of vitamin C a day—see Chapter xx, “Sensible Supplementation.”) In short order, Cousins’ lab results improved. He could move more easily, and the quality of his sleep also improved: “I made the joyous discovery that 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect that gave me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.”

Buoyed by his success, and bothered by the noise, bad food, and general unpleasantness of hospital life, Cousins checked out and moved into a luxurious hotel nearby, where he “could laugh twice as hard at half the price.” He had a movie projector and screen set up in his room (this was in the days before VCRs) and rented Marx Brothers movies and Three Stooges comedies. In addition, Cousins’ friend, Allen Funt, donated copies of the television show he produced, “Candid Camera,” the program that secretly filmed people doing silly things. To the amazement of Cousins’ doctors, the more he laughed, the more he improved. Within a few months, he could walk using metal leg braces, and he returned to work. Eventually, the braces came off. After a while, he recovered his ability to type, and his only residual disability was sluggishness in his fingers while playing difficult compositions on the organ.

“A sense of humor makes a person healthy, wealthy, and wisecracking.”
Henny Youngman

As you may know, Cousins described his unique recovery program in his book, Anatomy of an Illness (1979), a huge bestseller that awakened millions to the healing power of humor. Goodman and Klein have not become quite as famous, but they don’t care: They’re too busy laughing.

“Humor is an affirmation of humanity’s superiority to all
that befalls us.” Romain Gary

Goodman’s father survived his heart surgery, and his son returned to his consulting work in organizational development—building teamwork, encouraging creative problem solving, and generally helping large institutions run more smoothly. He completely forgot about Alvin, the amusing van driver—until one evening. “I happened to tune into a radio talk show whose host asked: ‘What makes you laugh?’ The listeners told him, and I found myself riveted by their responses. I began thinking about Alvin, and how I’d used humor in my organizational-development work, but I realized I’d never been serious about it.”

Goodman got serious about humor, and launched the Humor Project, an organization that has helped more than 500,000 businesspeople, educators, managers, and health care providers cultivate lightness of spirit in the face of life’s weighty matters (see Resources). “Humor fit right into my work. Organizations run better, and people solve problems more creatively when they don’t take things too seriously.”

The Humor Project is not a school for comedians. “Personally, I’m not a good joke-teller,” Goodman admits. “Instead, the Project encourages people to see the ‘divine comedy’ in life all around them. When you look for humor, you find it, and life becomes more enjoyable and productive.”

“God gave us humor to compensate for the law of gravity.”
Henny Youngman

Allen Klein’s wife died in 1978. “Her death was an incalculable loss for me,” he recalls, “but as the months passed, I began reflecting on what Ellen had taught me. Her most important lesson was that we’re here to have a good time. She turned every occasion into an opportunity to enjoy herself, and everyone she knew became her playmate.”

Klein sold his business and went to work for a hospice, helping the terminally ill deal with their final passage. Klein was struck by the way the hospice residents appreciated humor and benefited from it—and by how guilty their visitors seemed to feel about laughing while the Grim Reaper hovered so nearby. Klein decided to encourage humor by becoming a self-proclaimed “jollytologist.” Eventually, he wrote The Healing Power of Humor (see Resources), and now lectures internationally about using mirth to cope with stress, loss, and disappointment.

“A smile is a curve that set everything straight.” Phyllis Diller

The Emotional Benefits of Humor

“We don’t laugh because we’re happy.
We’re happy because we laugh.” William James

Take a moment right now and smile. Not one of those tight-lipped, corners-of-the-mouth grins you might give your boss’ wife when she insists you have a second helping of something you can’t stand, but a big, toothy grin. Now focus on how the smile makes you feel. Chances are you feel a little better than you did a few sentences ago. Why? Because mental health is a two-way street. Smiling is not just a result of happiness. It’s also a cause. “Smiling,” explains health educator Robert Cooper, Ph.D., president of the Center for Health and Fitness Excellence in Bemidji, Minnesota, “resets the neurochemistry of the brain toward more positive emotions.”

The big smiles that encourage positive emotions are popularly known as ear-to-ear grins. But according to research by Paul Ekman, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of California’s San Francisco Medical Center Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, they should be called eye-to-eye grins. Dr. Ekman says that tight-lipped, smiles do not improve mental health. For a smile to boost feelings of happiness, it must involve the entire face, particularly the muscles in the outer corners of the eyes.

“A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It’s jolted by every pebble on the road.” Henry Ward Beecher

A sense of humor—smiling and the laughter that often follows it—not only enhances our self-perception of happiness, it also improves our emotional outlook: “Humor give us the power to go on,” Klein says. Norman Cousins is not the only person to use mirth to gain power over an illness. Abraham Lincoln employed it to fight bouts of depression throughout his life. Once during a bleak period of the Civil War, Lincoln’s Cabinet sat dumbfounded as the President read to them from a book of humorous stories. Lincoln laughed, but no one else did. “Gentlemen,” he said, “why don’t you laugh? If I did not laugh, I’d die.”

“Humor acts to relieve fear. Rage is impossible when mirth prevails.” William Fry, M.D.

“Humor helps us cope,” Klein asserts. Levity provides perspective, and helps us see problems in a larger framework. Once Klein found himself caught in a long, slow-moving supermarket check-out line. He caught himself growing increasingly annoyed, and in an effort to cope, he tried to see the humor in his predicament. He wound up thinking: This line is moving so slowly, the woman ahead of me just sprouted cobwebs. By the time he paid for his purchases, he felt fine. Of course, humor can’t heal all wounds or replace all losses, but it can help overcome them. To comedian Michael Pritchard, laughter is like changing a baby’s diaper: “It doesn’t get rid of the mess permanently, but it makes things okay for a while.”

“Humor is the ability to see three sides of one coin.” Ned Rorem

“Humor keeps us balanced,” Klein says. Humor offers a refuge from negative emotions before we become desperate. “Once we can see the comedy in our chaos, we are no longer so caught up in it, and our problems feel like less of a burden.”

The Physical Benefits of Humor

“A merry heart doeth like a good medicine.” Proverbs, 17:22

Laughter is Nature’s form of ho-ho-holisitc medicine. Scientists are not exactly sure why we have a sense of humor, but smiling and laughter are innate, and therefore presumably confer some evolutionary survival advantage. In one study, researchers rated the dispositions of a group of medical students, then followed them for 25 years. By age 50, 14 percent of those rated “hostile” had died, but among those rated “easygoing,” the death rate was only 2 percent.

Babies begin to smile when only a few weeks old, and they typically laugh by nine weeks. At four months of age, healthy nonabused babies laugh several times an hour, and they keep it up well into their school years. But then our cuture’s “get serious” socialization kicks in, and laughter declines. “Adults often go days or weeks without laughing,” says Leslie Gibson, R.N., founder of the Comedy Carts program at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, Florida. “Some people seem to lose the ability to laugh, and need help relearning it.”

“Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of
sense and nonsense.” Anonymous

William Fry, M.D., a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford University, and an expert on the physiology of mirth, notes that a hearty belly laugh exercises a surprisingly large number of muscles. He estimates that 100 laughs provides a workout equivalent to about 10 minutes on a rowing machine. Dr. Fry recommends laughter to everyone as a kind of “inner jogging,” but he notes that it’s especially important for those who are bed-ridden or otherwise unable to get much exercise.

Laughter also stimulates respriation, and heart rate. This increases the oxygen content of the blood, helping all body systems perform more efficiently. At the end of a hearty laugh, blood pressure falls, and a wave a relaxation washes over the body.

Like other forms of exercise, laughter releases endorphins, the body’s own feel-good, pain-relieving brain chemicals. In one study, researchers at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, divided a group of volunteers into two groups, and exposed them to increasingly painful electric shocks. One group watched a Bill Cosby comedy routine and the other watched a video on gardening. The participants were able to turn off the electric shocks when they became “too painful.” Guess which group could stand more discomfort.

“Warning: Humor May Be Hazardous to Your Illness.”

The latest research shows that humor also boosts the immune system’s ability to fight disease. At Western New England College in Springfield, Massachusetts, Kathleen Dillon, Ph.D., a professor of psychology, explored the effects of humor on production of salivary immunoglobulin A (IgA), an antibody in the mouth and throat that fights the common cold. She measured IgA in healthy volunteers before and after they viewed each of two videos, an instrucation program about anxiety, and the comedy, Richard Pryor Live. After viewing the former, the participants showed no change in IgA levels, but after Richard Pryor Live, their IgA levels increased markedly. Next time you feel a cold coming on, run down to your local video outlet and rent a few comedies. They may not prevent the cold, but who knows? They just might.

The Healing Uses of Humor

“The arrival of a good clown exercises more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than 20 donkeys laden with drugs.”
Thomas Sydenham, 17th century English physician

As a fourth-grader, Leslie Gibson had the misfortune to be fat and wear glasses. “I was on the receiving end of a lot of nasty humor,” the now-trim 37-year-old nurse recalls. To escape her tormentors, on the way home from school, she used to duck into the shop of a shoemaker she knew. “He told me that if I could get the kids to laugh with me, they’d stop laughing at me.” It worked. Gibson became the class clown, and the taunting ceased.

As a nurse, Gibson began teaching stress management skills to patients at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, Florida. She used humor, and eventually received a grant from Joel Goodman’s Humor Project to develop a Comedy Cart for the hospital. “It was a small audio-visual cart with a TV, VCR, comedy videos, games, gag items, humorous books, and audio tapes. I wheeled it around the hospital as a free service to patients.”

Gibson’s Comedy Cart was an overnight sensation. Today, her program includes 10 carts for Morton Plant Hospital and two for its affiliated rehabilitation center. Volunteers wheel the carts around the hospital every weekday afternoon, and they’ve proved so popular that frequently patients must phone in reservations to guarantee a visit.

Gibson’s Comedy Carts attracted media attention, and one day she got a call from the Ringling Brothers Clown College in Sarasota. Several clowns wanted to volunteer. Gibson now has 60 clowns who wheel Comedy Carts in full clown suits: grease paint, red noses, Bozo hair, clown costumes, and oversized shoes. A few years ago, Ringling Brothers relocated its Clown College to Wisconsin, so Gibson opened her own. “We take 20 people twice a year and they train for three hours, five nights a night a week for eight weeks. Afterward, we ask that they donate four hours a month to our program.” (see Resources)

“A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Mary Poppins.

Clowning in hospitals has become a growth industry. At the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, Ruth Hamilton, M.A., founder of the Carolina Health and Humor Association (aka Carolina HA HA), set up the Laugh Mobile for cancer patients. Designed to look like an old-fashioned circus wagon, it contains an assortment of humorous materials, including practical joke items patients are invited to use on the staff. (see Resources)

In New York, the Big Apple Circus launched the Clown Care Unit, whose initials, CCU, are a take-off on the coronary care units (CCUs) in many hospitals. “We specialize in the funny bone,” says CCU staffer, Dr. Loon (aka Kim Winslow). CCU members perform “clown rounds” three days a week for children at six New York hospitals. These “doctors of delight” combine mime, juggling, slapstick, music, and magic tricks for the amusement of the young patients and their families. CCU favorites include red nose transplants, a stethoscope that blows bubbles, and drawing blood—with a sketch pad and a red magic marker (see Resources).

Seven days without humor makes one weak.” Mort Walker

“Hi, this is Steve. You’ve reached my office. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. Please include the date and time of your call—and your shoe size.” This is not the typical family physician’s phone message. But Steve Allen, Jr., M.D., an assistant professor of family practice at the Binghamton clinical campus of the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, is not your typical family doctor. Dr. Allen is also the son of the comedian and television personality of the same name. Dr. Allen views humor as a way to counteract the stress associated with disease, literally dis-ease. While many physicians adopt an all-business, “professional” posture with their patients, Dr. Allen often mixes physical exams with juggling lessons, and other forms of gentle silliness calculated to help his patients relax.

“Healing humor is not necessarily about telling jokes,” explains Alison Crane, R.N., M.S., a psychiatric nurse in Skokie, Illinois, who founded the American Association of Therapeutic Humor in 1986. “I’m not very good at telling jokes and I stay away from them. Therapeutic humor is a way to build rapport and decrease people’s anxiety about their illness and the health professionals they have to deal with. Humor humanizes caring, and when people feel they’re relating to real human beings—not just automatons in white coats—they respond much better.”

Instead of telling jokes, Crane often shares stories about her children. “Once I was having trouble getting through to an elderly woman, so I told her that my three-year-old daughter was in a quandary about what she wanted to be when she grew up. She couldn’t decide between a garbage collector or a dolphin. The woman got a big kick out of that. She opened right up and started talking about her grandchildren.”

“Humor is the hole that lets the sawdust out of a
stuffed shirt.” Henny Youngman

In 1974, San Francisco cardiologists Meyer Friedman, M.D., and Ray Rosenman, M.D., published Type-A Behavior and Your Heart about their studies showing that the beligerent, hard-driving, time-pressured behavior they termed “Type-A” substantially increased risk of heart attack. The book became a bestseller and almost overnight, “Type-A” became a household term. But critics said they would not be convinced until Friedman and Rosenman showed that changing Type-A’s into more relaxed Type-B’s actually reduced their heart-attack risk.

Friedman teamed up with nurse Diane Ullmer, R.N., M.S., and they developed an intensive counseling program for Type-A heart-attack survivors designed to help them mellow out and smell the roses. Among other exercises (see Chapter XX, “Ornish Therapy”), participants were encouraged to use mirth. Whenever they felt the bile of hostility rising within them, they were taught to find humor in the situation, and point it out instead of yelling about the problem. They were also instructed to laugh at themselves at least twice a day. After three years in the counseling program, 9 percent of the participants had suffered recurrent heart attacks. But in the nonparticipant control group, the heart-attack rate was 19 percent, a highly significant difference.

How to Bring More Humor Into Your Life

“In humor, what is applealing to one person is appalling to another.” Melvin Helitzer, author of Comedy Writing Secrets

Why don’t we laugh more often? Mainly because we’ve learned not to. Parents and teachers spend a good deal of time telling children: “Wipe that smile off your face.” “Get serious.” “Stop smirking.” “Settle down.” And “Stop acting silly.” In addition, laughter requires both sponteneity and surrender of control. As people become adults, they place a good deal of value on self-control, and often feel ambivalent about spontaneity.

But a mature adult should also understand the need for levity now and then. When Steven Spielberg was filming the holocaust movie, “Shindler’s List,” he became so saddened by his subject that a few times a week while on location in Poland, he called comedian Robin Williams and asked him to run through some stand-up routines. If you have a particuarly funny friend, you might do the same, but if not, tickle your funny bone with the help of these suggestions from Goodman and Klein:

• Know your audience. Humor is individual. Psychology Today magazine once published 30 jokes and asked readers if they found them funny. More than 14,000 readers replied with responses all over the map. Every joke was rated “very funny” by some readers, and “not at all funny” by others. In the words of comedian Henny Youngman, “Humor is a form of communication understood by some, and misunderstood by most.”

• Laugh at yourself. “Those without a sense of humor,” Young- man once quipped, “can be very funny.” Of course, they don’t mean to be, and when people begin laughing, those who are unintentionally funny may become embarrassed, self-conscious, or insulted. If this happens to you, try to step outside yourself and see your gaff the way your audience sees it. Laugh at yourself and people laugh with you, not at you.

• Keep it tasteful. Don’t poke fun at anyone’s race, ethnic group, gender, weight, occupation, or anything else that might be offensive. Also, avoid sarcasm and ridicule. If there has to be a butt of the joke, target yourself or some inanimate object.

• Develop a humor first-aid kit. Keep a funny book or tape close at hand, and dip into it several times a day. Wear humorous buttons, and post cartoons, amusing bumperstickers, and other witty items where you live, work, and play. Your author has a collection of “Doonesbury” and “Far Side” cartoons in his office, plus the following bumpersticker: “God grant me patience—right now!” (see Resources)

• Instead of flowers or food, give sick friends humorous gifts. Try a joke book, a comedy video, or a few gag items.

• Keep an eye out for the absurdities of everyday life. Amusing quips and situations happen all the time. If you look for them, you’ll find them.

• Encourage others to laugh. Mirth is contagious.

“The one serious conviction a person should have is that
nothing should be taken too seriously.” Samuel Butler

Resources:
The Humor Project. Joel Goodman’s organization sponsors an annual conference in Saratoga Springs, New York, on “The Positive Power of Humor and Creativity.” Speakers have included Jay Leno, Steve Allen, and Bernie Siegel, M.D. The Humor Project publishes a “jest-selling” quarterly magazine, Laughing Matters, and HumoResources, an extensive catalogue of materials both silly and serious about using humor for fun and profit. In addition, the organization provides “fun-ding” for innovative efforts to incorporate humor into the serious business of life. Contact The Humor Project at 110 Spring St., Saratoga Springs, NY 12866-3397.
The Healing Power of Humor, by Allen Klein. Jeremy Tarcher/Putnam Publishing, New York, 1989.
American Association of Therapeutic Humor. A professional organization of nurses, psychologists, clergy, and social workers who use humor in their work. Write for free information. 222 South Merimac #303, St. Louis, MO 63105.
Comedy Carts. Contact Leslie Gibson/Comedy Carts, 430 Park Place Blvd., Clearwater, FL 34619-3926.
Carolina Health and Humor Association. Contact Ruth Hamilton, 5223 Revere Rd., Durham, NC 27713.
Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit. Contact 35 West 35th St., New York, NY 10011.
Funny Side Up. A catalog of silly things. P.O. Box 2800, 425 Stump Rd., North Wales, PA 19454.
The Lighter Side. Amusing gift items. P.O. Box 25600, 4514 - 19th Street Court East, Bradenton, FL 34206-5600.
Funny Times: A Monthly Humor Review. This newspaper scours the print media for cartoons, jokes, and humorous stories. 3108 Scarborough Rd., Cleveland Heights, OH 44118.