The Last Time You Laughed Hard, Your Stomach Hurt
Some diseases may be transmissible, but none is as infectious as the cure of laughter
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
In movies, the music changes when something interesting is about to happen; it gets faster or softer, and there might be a drum roll. In real life, the soundtrack is often silenced. But for comedians, it’s entirely different. They rely on words and body language designed to make us laugh.
When was the last time you laughed so hard that your stomach hurts? That kind of ache is what Bob Marley would say about music — when it hits you, you feel no pain.
Did you know deaf signers sprinkle their signed sentences with laughter like emoticons in written text?
Why do people laugh at all? What is the point of it?
There’s a massive amount of comedy on Netflix, and I dare anyone to try and watch all of it, and that would be me. I Watch A LOT. And I laugh — A LOT. Most of the time, I watch while cooking or at night before going to sleep. It helps relax me and go to sleep faster.
Freud saw laughter and humor as providing a kind of release valve and types of material that generate laughter.
A diversity of fields study humor — biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and literature, to name a few. Some researchers study the area of humor in our relationships, and others explore the connection between bullying and comedy. And many health practitioners claim that humor possesses various health benefits.
For years, my husband and I have begun the new year at a nightclub to help usher in the year laughing. We believe that if we start the year laughing, we’ll continue to do so.
What I like about stand-up comedies is that the comedian holds a mirror up to my private life and secret thoughts. The world is a home of high drama, and it’s difficult not to feel lost in the pain and chaos of daily living.
Some stand-up comedians take the stage to make us laugh and shape our cultural views and beliefs, whether they know it or not. They tap into what we will now acknowledge as our evolutionary instinct to understand better, be better, and do better. A little self-awareness can provide the balance we crave, centering us with needed levity.
They are the jokes we cannot forget that shock us — moments of redemption, excitement, grief, or shame — parts of larger political and cultural moments. You might not like these jokes, or they might make you deeply uncomfortable, but it connects us through discomfort in the same way we can through laughter.
George Carlin, for instance, was a master at accentuating the negative and poked much fun at the logical fallacies of American culture, especially regarding politics and religion. On purpose, he joked about subjects usually considered unfunny, such as torture, rape, genocide, etc. All designed to prove that we modern humans weren’t much different from our supposedly more barbaric progenitors.
Stand-up comedians are rhetors
Stand-up comedians are rhetors who use humor as a rhetorical instrument to inform and persuade mass audiences in the classical rhetorical tradition. Their anecdotes make us laugh with their high-octane antics. We recognize ourselves in their jokes, and they teach us the healing power of laughing at ourselves. We can even align them with the historical heritage of Sophists and jesters and then with the contemporary tradition of public intellectuals and social activists.
You can even look at humor as a computational tool humans have developed to detect and correct errors in their thinking. But how often do we recognize comedians as having a rhetorical motive; stand-up comedy is often enjoyed and appreciated as a performance but seldom analyzed or respected as persuasion. We mostly think of their labor as laughs from ephemeral audiences in comedy clubs or on couches at home.
I think comedians are the most astute social commentators on the human condition, and who is better than them to peel the layers we reluctantly hide behind? The ability to see oneself and culture with 20/20 razor precision — the flaws, the wretched thoughts, the uncomfortable truths, the selfishness, the drunkenness, the bad behavior — provides some of the best comedic material.
I like comedians who show us ourselves, like Tom Papa (one of my favorites), who gets you to laugh at yourself and help you feel better at the end of the night. They let us share some of our humanity with jokes, funny stories, and ridiculous re-enactments of some of our experiences as a human.
Think of Robin Williams, Richard Prior, who remains the benchmark for comedians worldwide, David Chapelle, Chris Rock, or George Carlin. There are more.
One of the greatest is the one I grew up watching on the large screen. Charlie Chaplin was among the fathers and a giant of slapstick comedy, which leans on non-verbal, physical jokes, tinging his comedy with melancholy and social commitment.
In conclusion
Over the years, experts have been speculating on laughter and humor; some are convincing and verifiable, while others are more guesswork than science. Yet, they reached common ground and agreed that the secret of this whole monkey business of humor lies in its influence on mental and physical health.
A night of laughter offers more than just relief; it can remarkably increase the heart and breathing rate, reducing blood pressure. In addition, laughing can help protect from viruses by improving the immune system and releasing anti-infection antibodies to help protect our body from infection.
So, if you like laughter, consider it a sensible medical recommendation to indulge in it as often as possible. Permit yourself to laugh — loud and out loud — whenever anything hits you as funny. The people around you may think you’re strange, but sooner or later, they’ll join in, even if they don’t know what you’re laughing about.
Thank you for enduring this laughter journey with me.
Remember, the most important thing is to enjoy a laugh or fake it if you have to.
I got the idea to write this article from @Janin Lyndovsky, who succinctly responded to my last article, We Heal Ourselves and Others by Fictionalizing Our Pain, Expressing It, and Overcoming It in Our Stories.
She said this:
“Laughing at my hopeless situation made me feel so much better, plus protected my mental health.”
Thank you, Janin!
And thank you for reading.