Laughter Therapy - The Benefits of Making Others Laugh
“If I have caused just one person to wipe away a tear of laughter, that’s my reward.” Victor Borge
Making people laugh is very therapeutic. I used to criticize would be comics for getting up on open mike night and using stage time for therapy. And I still do. When they aren’t even trying to be funny. I would see people get up and tell these awful stories about their lives that should be reserved for a psychologists couch. These stories weren’t funny. There was no real attempt at writing a joke, it was just a chance for someone to get up and tell the world their problems. I call it the “Jerry Springer effect.”
But making people laugh can get you out of your doldrums. The other night I appeared at an event. This was the first event I had performed at since my mother had surgery for lung cancer. I have been using laughter therapy on her and myself to overcome the stress of her illness. But the last few days I found myself not as positive as I normally am. Even moments before getting up on stage I wasn’t in the mood to speak. As soon as I was introduced I found myself getting that positive feeling back. I stepped on to the podium, stood up in front of the audience, and I found myself shedding away all negative feelings. The laughter from the audience made me feel good about myself again. I have been doing stand-up comedy since the age of 12 and making people laugh is not only my career it’s my mission. Becoming a motivational humorist has been most rewarding for me. Being able to make people laugh and then expounding on the benefits of humor and laughter has given new meaning to my life. When I can make an audience laugh, I know I have made them forget about their problems even if it’s just for a few minutes. Milton Berle said, “Laughter is an instant vacation.” Laughter is a vacation from the stresses we put on our selves. Like going on a vacation we go to get away from our every day problems.
Over the past several years not only do I get the instant reward of an audience’s laughter, but the extra benefit of members in the audience coming up to me to tell me their experiences with laughter therapy. I gave a presentation at the Bellagio in Las Vegas last year to the International Association of Building Contractors. As I was collecting my props several people came up to me. They wanted to share their stories with me. One lady told me about her son, who was a police officer in the town where she lived. One night while on patrol he accidentally came across a pipe bomb. The bomb blew up in his hand. This is not something you would think would be something discussed in the same topic with humor. The lady told me that her son was in pretty good spirits about the incident and one of the reasons was many of the family members started making humorous comments about it. At first she was mortified that they would joke about her son losing his fingers in front of him until she realized that he was laughing and that it was a way of coping with the loss of most of his fingers. In order to cope sometimes we laugh at very morbid subjects. Subjects that others would be offended by. Even though they probably didn’t realize it, joking about the accident was also a way that family members used to cope with this near tragedy and they felt better making him laugh.
You don’t have to get up on stage to reap the benefits of making people laugh. Share humor with a friend or group of friends. Call someone up, especially someone you know going through a challenging time, and tell them a joke. Send a friend a humorous card, let them know you are thinking of them. Clip out a funny article or cartoon from the paper and put it up on the bulletin board at work. You will immediately feel the positive effect of your mental state by making someone laugh. Making someone laugh is a win-win situation. What I have found is that sharing humor with the audience is your gift to them and their laughter is their gift to you.
We are all here for a spell; get all the good laughs you can. –Will Rogers