Zachary Arnold and Danielle Sexton: Laughter and the Body

"Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine." - George Gordon Byron

We've all heard something similar to this quote, but is it true? Is laughter cheap medicine? How does it affect our bodies and can it enhance overall health? Do people who laugh more live healthier lives? These are a few questions that we are going to try to answer. 

Our expectation is that laughter, as a part of an overall positive demeanor, is beneficial to the health and well being of a person.  Qualitative data would seem to suggest that a patient with a positive outlook (to include lots of laughing) would feel better, but are they truly better?  Does their positivity and laughter act merely as a sort of placebo effect, their brains tricking them into believing that their circumstances are better than the reality? Or, are there actual physical manifestations of the healing process?

If these manifestations do exist, what are they?  We hypothesize that laughter could act as a medicine simply because people feel happier. A person's morale improves which in turn could improve their health. If peer-reviewed studies did, in fact, show laughter to be beneficial, we would not expect it to be disease specific.  That is to say that an individual suffering from leukemia would not receive greater aid than a patient with epilepsy.

In regards to overall health and well being, we believe that laughter could increase the lifespan of some and stave off hereditary disease in others. If we can show that laughter has a positive, measurable effect on the body, then health care professionals will be able to think of ways to adapt treatments and supplement preventative medicine.

If these hypotheses are correct then should comedic entertainment be more of a staple in medicine than what it is today? What do you think? Leave your comments below.

Using Laughter to Correct Society

Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter had three main components.

• Comedy is human: we laugh at people or the things they do
• Laughter seems to require a certain detachment or emotional distance from the object of laughter
• Laughter has a social function

I had never really considered these ideas about laughter, although after reading Bergson’s theory, I feel I have a deeper understanding of why laughter occurs, and why it can sometimes carry a negative connotation that I normally (and surprisingly) would never consider. I know it is rude to make fun of people, but after discussing this theory in class, I seem to carry more responsibility for my laughter, and I am definitely more conscientious of how it affects people.

I think society is always evolving. Examples such as the legalization of marijuana, prohibition (alcohol) and the revocation of prohibition, and the controversey over same -sex marriages are just a few reminders of how basically everything evolves, and society has a tendency of forcing those changes, no matter the individual's feelings. It’s almost as if ’society’ is its own entity, causing changes that are mostly uncontrollable by individuals.  Many of the texts we have read in this class do not seem that funny because the humor is lost on us, an evolved society that already has more widely accepted civil rights for women, men and children. Many of the ideas introduced by comedy, i.e. women protesting the government in Lysystrata or Adam, the judge, trying to assault a young girl in the Broken Jug and actually being reprimanded for the act, were just unreal notions the author used too provoke laughter. I find this more than a little disturbing. Did the authors know exactly what they were doing? I really think so. I hate to take the ‘laughter’ out of comedy, but if these authors (Ibsen, Von Kleist, Goldoni) had not found a way to introduce these new and crazy ideas to an evolving society, we may never have experienced the checks and balances today’s media such as movies, plays, news stations, and documentaries provide. Transparency of the government through comedy (which seems funny just writing this) seems to have slithered by all the corrupt governments' censorship and out into the mainstream of the public through the ages over and over. These writings seem to have their own small civil rights’ movements encapsulated in each story, and I think that is amazing. It appears that comedy and laughter can break down barriers for society as its own entity. I know that laughter can help make friends, but I feel the big picture of laughter can help improve society in an amazingly tangible and viable way. Maybe I am giving too much credit to comedy, but many of these stories allude to civil rights we all take for granted in 2014.

Laughter: More than Inconsequence

     I always thought laughter was some inconsequential byproduct of an arbitrarily humorous event. Never did it occur to me that it is a subconscious construction designed for societal improvement. Even further than that, my understanding of knowledge would have been unlikely to obtain the notion that laughter could be used as a tool to appeal to the conscience of an audience, in order for them to see just how ridiculous or notwithstanding their perception of something might be. 

     In reexamining Lysistrata, it can easily be seen how laughter can be harnessed as the "spoonful of sugar" with which the medicines of social improvement and criticism can more easily go down. Obviously, nobody particularly enjoys being shown that their current understanding of things is wrong, and thus for this reason social criticisms can be difficult to convey to an uneager audience, just as medicine is often difficult to administer to those unwitting to its value. So, like the sugar to the medicine, the laughter that a comedy can invoke can serve as a lubricant to the delivery of a constructive message otherwise not as amicable to the audience. 

     Aristophanes utilizes many invocations of laughter to convey the point more easily to the audience. Take the scene where Kinesias uses the child between himself and Myrrhine as a means of luring into bed with him for example. In this scene, he tries to get her to give up her cause and return to the way of things before Lysistrata's female-led revolution. This scene exists only to serve as an exposition of the strength and resilience of the Athenian women, especially in contrast to the sexual, simple-mindedness of their counterparts. The Greek men watching this play probably wouldn't have recieved well the raw statement "women can be stronger than you men," between gender-roles associated with the society of their time as well as their arete, or sense of pride in manhood. However, when comic elements of the scene are in place, such as Kinesias's ridiculous, under-breath mutterings to his son for him to scream for his mother, the audience will more easily accept the message and all that comes with it- criticism included. The men can laugh at just how ridiculous and desparate Kinesias's methods are in getting his way, and in doing so are more likely to swallow the virtue of Myrrhine here as well. 

     Thinking of laughter as a form of social-improvement-lubricant, it's quite easy to see just how far off it would be to take laughter as merely an inconsequential by-product. Clearly laughter has both practical purpose as well as physical effect, and has been used for centuries to filter concepts into a language that nearly everyone can understand.

** Sorry for the length, but when I read "in-depth" for this assignment, I wasn't sure if that requirement had changed or not, so I played it safe and took my time developing my thoughts. Thanks for reading!**