Realizations Inc

©Arlene Taylor PhD

He had been caught red-handed trying to transplant a frog into a girl’s locker, and subsequently he had been sent to see the school nurse—me. The pug-nosed, freckled-faced thirteen-year-old now stretched dejectedly in my office. Gazing at the floor, he ran his hands through unruly auburn hair and queried, “How come teachers have no sense of humor?”

Suppressing a chuckle, I started to explain the difference between someone possessing a sense of humor and choosing to laugh about a specific incident—his most recent prank, for instance. He interrupted to persist, “But where does it go in adulthood?”

“It doesn’t go anywhere,” I replied. “A sense of humor is a mental faculty—although not everyone chooses to develop it.”

“Whatever,” he said, sighing heavily. “My teacher sure didn’t crack a smile!”

“Oh,” I replied. “Laughter is a separate concept from a sense of humor. Laughter is believed to be a sound that comes from Broca’s area in the left frontal lobe.” A sense of humor is associated with functions in the right frontal lobe. On the other hand, what people choose to laugh about is very subjective. “Even if your teacher thought what you did was funny, she probably would have suppressed her laughter,” I commented. “In addition, although laughter is a behavior evident by the third or fourth month of life, one of the most common admonitions to children is “stop laughing!” No wonder human beings are often conditioned to repress it!” The student grinned somewhat ruefully.

The incident took me back to my childhood. Unfortunately I had had great difficulty suppressing my laughter and consequently was often in proverbial hot water. My giggles tended to bubble up in the most undesirable of situations, at least according to prevailing standards. I tended to laugh at funerals, in the middle of stern lectures from a teacher, during sermons, and even during prayer, much to the chagrin of the preacher’s wife—my mother!

Like the time an exceeding plump, elderly gentleman in my father’s congregation fell sound asleep during an especially long supplication. Snoring loudly he gradually slid further and further down in the pew until he plopped onto the carpet with a decided thump. Jarred awake, he blurted out disgustedly in a stentorian voice, “Oh for Pete’s sake!” Of course I burst out laughing. Mother elbowed me in the ribs and hissed “stop it!” The more I tried to control my mirth, the more it burst forth, especially when the parishioner made all sorts of grunting sounds as he struggled, red faced and panting, to climb back into the pew. Laughter being as catching as yawning, other children in the congregation were soon giggling as well, and the situation went to the proverbial hell in a hand basket. It did serve to shorten the prayer.

At the end of that service, a church attendee asked me rather ponderously if I didn’t find it hugely significant that there were no pictures of the Deity smiling. Up until then I hadn’t noticed, not having had much exposure to religious “art.” My spontaneous reply was, “Well if that’s true, the artists must have been either depressed or brainwashed.” Unfortunately it didn’t paint me in a very desirable light when she reported that response to my parents and suggested they “do something about your daughter.”

Believe me they tried, through a plethora of incidents during which I tried to contain my mirth—with only marginal success. They ranged from the teacher who told me to Spinish your felling (and appeared to see no humor in his directive), to the singer whose half slip slipped down during an energetic vocal rendition, to the usher who upset the offering plate mid-aisle when he lost his toupee while bending over to pick up a dollar bill that had taken wing. Then there was the old lady who slipped on the ice and fell in a snowdrift, pumping arms and legs energetically and burbling a variety of unmentionable epithets until someone rescued her.

I remember hearing about an adolescent who burst into the house, a bundle of kinetic energy with a grin splitting his face. “We heard a cool lecture today on what smiling does for the immune system,” he announced. Sitting at her desk, his mother nodded but did not look up. The teenager skidded to a halt beside her, concerned. “Mom, are you sad today?” The words came out haltingly.

“Of course not. I’m quite happy, actually.” This time she glanced up at him but her face did not change its somber expression. He looked closely at her for a moment, then bounded up the stairs muttering under his breath, “Well if that’s true, your face doesn’t know it!” How sad.

Reportedly it requires twice as many muscles to frown as it does to smile. Why would anyone expend the extra energy to perpetually frown? Dr. John Diamond believes that smiling, or even looking at a smile, boosts life energy. In his book Your Body Doesn’t Lie, he states that smiling can strengthen the thymus gland—a primary immune system organ, as smile muscles (zygomaticus major) and the thymus gland are closely linked.

Laughter is an important coping tool that some fail to use because of erroneous belief systems. Comedian Victor Borge said that laughter is the shortest distance between two people. It can be immensely helpful when people are dealing with illnesses. Sharing a chuckle is a reminder that although someone may be seriously ill, human beings are more than their diseases and cannot allow their ailments to crowd out all else. According to Dr. Samuel Shem, humor is one of the most effective ways to deal with a high-stress situation that you cannot escape. By making fun of it, humor can help give you power in what often appears to be a powerless situation.

In his book Who Gets Sick, author Justice Blair wrote “If we assume a facial expression of happiness we can increase blood flow to the brain and stimulate release of favorable neurotransmitters.” When your face shapes a smile—even more so when you’re engaged in mirthful laughter—your immune system is boosted. The level of the antibody Immunoglobulin A (IgA), designed to provide localized protection on mucous membranes, increases.

Someone has said that laughter is a smile that has taken on life. Laughter can turn almost any disadvantage into an advantage. When you look for humor in your misfortunes, they do not necessarily go away but you tend to perceive them from a different perspective. The seat of humor and the home of new options are believed to reside very close to each other in the brain. When you develop and use a healthy sense of humor, you can disengage from your predicaments to some degree and can marshal your resources to recognize opportunities more easily. Humor helps you to maintain perspective, and avoid getting caught up in your own melodramas. As Charles Schulz, creator of the cartoon character PEANUTS, said, “If I were given the opportunity to present a gift to the next generation, it would be the ability for each individual to learn to laugh at himself.”

Sir William Osler referred to laughter as the music of life and believed that a patient with a well-developed sense of humor had a better chance of recovery than a stolid individual who seldom laughed. In his book Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins described how laughter helped him heal from a life-threatening auto-immune disease. Where injections of morphine had failed, he reported the joyous discovery that “ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.” No doubt, since laughter stimulates the release of endorphins, the body’s own natural pain-killers which are 200 times more powerful than morphine.

Author Allen Klein wrote in The Healing Power of Humor, “After a fallen tree has landed on your car, putting a sign on it that reads COMPACT CAR may not make the car whole again, but it will help you see your misfortune a little differently.” When I landed my first organ-playing job for pay, I arrived at the church in plenty of time for the Sunday morning service. Six-inch letters on the large billboard prominently situated on the front lawn announced the sermon title: “Do You Know What Hell Is?” Underneath, in five-inch letters were the words, “Come and hear our new organist.” During the service I was so busy trying to keep my laughter under wraps that I completely forgot to be nervous.

Psychoneuroimmunology, the study of the mind-body connection, is tracing the effect of one’s thoughts on neurotransmitter ratios in the brain as well as on immune system function. Unmanaged grief is associated with lowered activity of the body’s T-cells (a type of white blood cell that attacks foreign invaders). Positive thinking styles are associated with higher levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that has an antidepressant action. Anxiety and muscle relaxation cannot really coexist. The relaxation response after a good laugh has been measured as lasting as long as forty-five minutes.

Evidence is accumulating to support the old axiom that a cheerful heart is good medicine. Choosing to wear a pleasant facial expression and to smile and laugh frequently does not mean you deny other appropriate emotions. It does mean you recognize that only twenty percent of the affect to your life from a given situation results from the event itself, while eighty percent can be contributed by your perception of and response to the event. A positive mental attitude, along with smiles and laughter, can improve your mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health. Make that choice. Start now!