The Magic Of Laughter / The Laughter Of Magic

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog,” author E.B. White once wrote. “Few people are interested, and the frog dies of it.” Although there is a place for study, we can kill off some of the beauty and joy of laughter and humor when we get too investigative. Various other quotations illuminate why a heavily left-brain approach may miss out: Einstein commented that everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. Francis Bacon poetically offered, “The sense resembles the sun, which shows the terrestrial globe but conceals the celestial, for thus the sense discovers natural things, while it shuts up divine.” Albert’s most often quoted line is probably that one that involves “E” equaling something squared, but another of his gems is “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their more primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”

Let’s celebrate and be in wonder and awe of laughter. Let’s revel in the unknown, mysterious, and magic of laughter and then let’s consider the laughter of magic. HOW precisely to do this leaves me wondering. Is not the act of writing about such things analytical by nature? A story may be in order.

We sat near the shores of Windsor, Ontario at the Canadian Therapeutic Humor Summit. I had only gotten to know Dr. Cliff Kuhn during the past couple of days, but it was serendipity that he was sitting next to me when the “laughter quake” exercise was announced by Dan Gascon. The concept is to have a hearty, extended laugh. Cliff and I took this to the limit. We moved quickly from any kind of gentle tittering right into cackles and guffaws and we approached the extremes of the laughter continuum, in what could be described as convulsing or the rare “die laughing” experience. By the end of the exercise, we were both on the floor and it would be uncouth of me to give details about the fluids that were emanating from our facial orifices. Respiration appeared questionable. When we finally finished, I was full of glee, totally relaxed, and I felt deeply connected with Cliff. I thought we might have been laughing for 45 seconds, but later other participants told me it was more like several minutes. They said that they would stop laughing, look over at the two of us, and start laughing again. Nothing can provide so much fun and good feeling in such a short time. (If your mind is in the gutter, consider whether both partners would be so happy with a three-minute experience.)

(excerpted from chapter 7 ofThe HoHo Dojo by Billy Strean, 2008)